You can configure AOS for your environment with a global path to access Alfresco, and you can configure property mapping for injecting custom properties and metadata into Office documents.

Setting up a global filepath to access Alfresco

In Windows Explorer, you can set up a Group Policy to manage Favorites on client machines, or share a .lnk file in your Links folder. This can be useful if you want to preconfigure the folder that users will need to access the repository from Microsoft Office (http://servername:port/alfresco/aos).

On a Windows 7 machine, the contents of Favorites in Windows Explorer is assembled from the .lnk files in C:\Users\username\Links. You can create a .lnk file in your Links folder and distribute this to the Links folder of other users, or preferably, you can use a Group Policy to manage Favorites on user machines.

To use a Group Policy:

1. In the Group Policy Management Console, navigate to User Configuration\Preferences\Window Settings\Shortcuts.

2. Create a new shortcut (Group Policy Object) to a folder (not a link to a URL) with the following UNC target path:

    \\servername@SSL\DavWWWRoot\alfresco\aos
   

   Alternatively, you can specify @port instead of @SSL, but not both. The default port is 443.

   For more information, see Configure a Shortcut Item.

Configuring mapping properties in Alfresco Office Services

Property mapping in AOS allows you to inject custom properties and metadata into Office documents. Property mapping is deactivated by default. Follow these instructions to activate property mapping.

Property mapping is different from the standard metadata extraction mechanism and should be carefully configured to ensure that different properties are set up. Properties stored in the repository are injected into Office documents when these files are read through AOS, and equally properties are extracted from Office files written through AOS and then updated in the repository.

Note: Injected properties form part of the document. If the document is removed from the organization, for example, anyone outside the organization reading the document can view all the properties that have been mapped into the document.

Note: Property mapping in Alfresco Office Services doesn’t work for password protected Microsoft Office Open XML files and will generate an exception. To ignore property mapping for password protected Microsoft Office Open XML files, set the property aos.contentFilter.ignoreOOXMLProtected=false in the alfresco-global.properties file.

Take note of the following:

• Single value properties only can be mapped in Office documents. Multi-value properties are ignored.
• Accepted data type properties are text, mltext, int, long, float, double, date, datetime and boolean. Other data type properties are ignored.
• The following constraints are supported: MINMAX for numeric data types, LENGTH for text, or LIST for text. Properties that have other constraints are ignored; for example, REGEX for text.
• Property mapping is only available for OOXML files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) and OLE files (.doc, .xls, .ppt). OLE files do not support read-only properties and are ignored. Protected properties are available in OOXML files only.

If any ignored properties are declared as mandatory, then users will not be able to save documents.

It is possible to define a list of types for new documents. Whenever a user creates a new document with the Save As dialog, Microsoft Office displays this list to choose from. If the type contains mandatory properties, Office enforces values for these properties before the file can be saved. Files created outside of Office (for example, in Windows Explorer) are created with a type of cm:content.

Alfresco provides basic configuration of four patterns, includedTypesPatterns, excludedTypesPatterns, includedAspectsPatterns and excludedAspectsPatterns in the aosBaseDataModelMappingConfiguration abstract bean.

1. Rename or copy the <classpathRoot\>/alfresco/extension/custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml.sample file to <classpathRoot\>/alfresco/extension/custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml.

   This sample configuration file activates metadata mapping for the basic cm:content type and all its sub-types, except for some system types. All type properties and all applied aspects (except for some system aspects) are mapped into the documents.

2. In custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml, check your file type based on the includedTypesPatterns and excludedTypesPatterns properties.

   Both properties contain a list of regular expressions that are applied to the fully qualified QName. A file is valid for property mapping if its type is accepted by one of the regular expressions in the includedTypesPatterns list and does not exist in the excludedTypesPatterns list. For more information on regular expressions, see Class pattern.

3. In custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml, check the file aspects based on the includedAspectsPatterns and excludedAspectsPatterns properties.

   If a file is valid for property mapping, aspects applied to this file are filtered further depending on the two properties, includedAspectsPatterns and excludedAspectsPatterns. Property mapping occurs only if the file type is included in the includedTypesPatterns list (even if there are aspects that are included in the includedAspectsPatterns property).

4. In custom-aos-metadata-mapping-context.xml, check the includedInstantiableTypesPatterns and excludedInstantiableTypesPatterns properties.

   These properties define the list of types that are available to users for document creation in the Save As dialog. If the includedInstantiableTypesPatterns is empty or not set, new documents are always created with the default type. If no system type matches the types configured in includedInstantiableTypesPatterns, the base type cm:content is used by default. If exactly one type matches the configuration, this type is automatically used for all documents created with the Save As dialog in Microsoft Office.

Configuring secure authentication with Identity Service

You can configure AOS to seamlessly integrate with Identity Service, disabling Basic Authentication and relying on Identity Service instead to perform the authentication when leveraging AOS capabilities.

Assuming Identity Service is properly installed and configured, the authentication.chain property should already be defined and should include an authentication chain component of type identity-service. For example:

authentication.chain=identity-service-1:identity-service,alfrescoNtlm-1:alfrescoNtlm

To integrate AOS and Identity Service, it is sufficient that the authentication.chain property defines an authentication chain component of type identity-service as the first available component.

It is now possible to perform the secure authentication via Identity Service when editing documents in Microsoft Office through Alfresco Content Services.

You can still access the AOS endpoints via a web browser as long as the secure authentication has been performed first by visiting the following URL (assuming the Alfresco Content Services host name is repo.example.com):

https://repo.example.com/alfresco/service/aos/authenticate

Note: The duration of the authenticated session will be affected by the session timeouts configured within Keycloak.