I tried going from Fedora 15 to Fedora 16, and the result was the same. I even tried using the installation DVD instead of preupgrade, but nothing changed. After some research, I was able to solve my problem. I made two changes, which helped me succeed. On the screen that shows the following options:

• Installation or Upgrade
• Troubleshooting

I hit the tab with the first option selected. It showed the options being used. I removed quiet and added nomodeset. Removing quiet helped me see what was going on and where exactly it was failing. Adding nomodeset actually fixed my problem. It is a known problem with Fedora 16 that for some hardware it fails when trying to change display resolution. Using nomodeset avoided any fancy display settings.

After some research, I concluded that the default gateway configuration had been lost. Apparently, one of the updates changed the networking behavior. Earlier, it used to obtain the default gateway automatically, but it wasn’t doing that now.

I tried setting the default gateway by editing files, etc. but it would get overwritten. Finally, the command that did it for me was the following:

route add default gw <router_IP_address>

1. CenterStage search features
2. Queues
3. Configuration of workflow reports and dashboards
4. Business Activity Monitor (BAM)
5. TaskSpace
6. Process Reporting Services (PRS)
7. Integrating workflows with external systems
8. High-Volume Server (HVS)
9. Lightweight SysObjects (LWSO)

Among these new topics, only Lightweight SysObjects are discussed adequately in the book Documentum 6.5 Content Management Foundations. The exam candidates, who are using this book for preparation, and plan to take the test after September 2, 2011, will need to use reference documentation or other resources for learning the topics 1-8 listed above.

I tried the AT&T path and the upgrade was simple and smooth over Wi-Fi. All my data and settings (that I have checked so far) are intact and I love the new experience. I struggle to recall any upgrades that have been easier.

In an audit trail, I want to count the number of users who viewed (dm_getfile event)
all the documents that belong to a particular object type every month. These documents are in a specific folder of a cabinet.

I made couple of assumptions in coming up with the DQL, but these are easy to adjust to suit specific needs. When looking for documents in a folder, I assumed the containment to be recursive. If you don’t need to look in the subfolders, just remove “, descend” in the folder() predicate below.

The other assumption I made was that the period of check was 1 calendar year.
For example, create a report for 2009 by each month. Again, if the need is different, the just modify the date range condition.

Alter the following DQL, by replacing <OBJECT_TYPE>, <FOLDER_PATH>, <FOUR_DIGIT_YEAR> below.

SELECT DATETOSTRING(time_stamp, 'yyyy/mm') AS period, COUNT(distinct user_name) AS viewers
FROM dm_audittrail
WHERE object_type = '<OBJECT_TYPE>'
AND event_name = 'dm_getfile'
AND DATEFLOOR(year, "time_stamp") = DATEFLOOR(year, DATE('01/01/<FOUR_DIGIT_YEAR>', 'mm/dd/yyyy'))
AND audited_obj_id IN (
SELECT r_object_id FROM dm_sysobject (all)
WHERE folder('<FOLDER_PATH>', descend)
)
GROUP BY DATETOSTRING(time_stamp, 'yyyy/mm')


A sample result from this query is shown below:

15 years ago, when I arrived in North Carolina, I had to relearn English. It took me about two years of tweaking the speech and listening comprehension areas in my brain to be able to reasonably communicate via the spoken word again. The written word was not such a challenge as I just had to learn some new spelling patterns (color vs. colour, etc.). I hardly remember anything that I had to adjust related to grammar.

A few years went by before I had to adjust again to “our prices can’t be beat” and “my car is broke“. It appeared that the words “beaten” and “broken” had fallen out of vogue by disuse. Some usage of “beat” and “broke” as past participle forms seems to be attributable to middle English for certain meanings, per Merriam-Webster. So I tucked couple of exceptions in the grammar rule memory section of my brain, and moved on without getting beat or broke by this acclimatization.

Last week, my neuron connections were jolted again. Within a week, I heard the following sentences from three persons in very different  professions:

• “Have you ate?”
• “I had went …”
• “I would have wrote …”

There’s no way I was going to look for a justification for this usage! Instead, I was a bit concerned about what my third-grader might be learning. I am quite sure about how the standardized tests such as GRE and GMAT would reward this usage. I wasn’t even thinking of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) because she doesn’t have to deal with that.

This morning, I stepped out with my daughter to walk her to the school-bus stop. As we passed our mailbox, she said, “Papa, our mailbox is broken.” I heaved a sigh of relief. Only the mailbox was broken; the language education in her classroom wasn’t.

The upgrade completed without any problems. However, the tomcat6 service won’t start up. There seemed to be multiple issues, such as the conf directory being empty. Updating tomcat6 using yum didn’t do much. So I removed and reinstalled tomcat6 as follows:
yum remove tomcat6
yum install tomcat6

That restored the conf folder but now I ran into class-not-found exceptions. It turned out that the Tomcat jars were present in a location different from the expected one. On further research, I discovered that the complete tomcat6 deployment consisted of several packages (tomcat6-lib, etc.), and the installed packages couldn’t be relied upon even though yum believed that they were installed/configured properly.

I decided to remove the tomcat6* packages using yum remove for each package listed by
yum list tomcat6*.

Then I installed tomcat6, which also installed the packages that it required. Tomcat6 was up and running in the first attempt after that. Alfresco also came up without any problem after I restored its webapp folder.

Disclaimers / Disclosures

1. This review represents my independent opinion.
2. I have not been paid for this review.
3. The publisher has provided me with a free copy of the book for writing this review.

Approach

This review does not attempt to provide information about Alfresco or WCM outside the context of the book. The review focuses on what the book offers, what it does well, and where it could have done better. Content outline and information about the authors is present on the publisher’s page for the book.

Review

When I received my review copy I had the following context about the subject of the book. I had reviewed a few Alfresco books over the last couple of years. I had deployed Alfresco recently on 64-bit Linux. I was familiar with the earlier rudimentary WCM features of Alfresco, but I had also heard about significant recent enhancements in this area. Once I started reading the book, I also put on the general reader hat looking for the desirable features of books in general.

In this review, I first share the things I liked about the book. Later, I will share the things that could have been better; these range from possible inaccuracies to minor annoyances.

Positives

This book is filled with code examples, which will aid anyone trying to implement the corresponding features. The examples are usually accompanied by detailed, step-by-step instructions. Many examples are also accompanied by good illustrations with bubbles/annotations on screenshots. In particular, I liked the nice figures illustrating content delivery and deployment.

The book contains good detail on installation, and the configuration details for various platforms are also likely to be helpful. When I had installed Alfresco on Linux 64-bit/Tomcat 6, I would have really benefited from such information since some details had changed across versions of Alfresco, Fedora, and Tomcat . However, I have some concerns regarding a few discrepancies in this area. For example, page 29 indicates that JDK5 is used for the book, but page 21 indicates that JDK 6 required. Page 29 indicates that the examples were created with Tomcat 6, but page 78 indicates tomcat5w. This mixing of two sets of product versions may lead to some surprises while following the instructions. Though this is not an issue, I was a little surprised to see that the Eclipse release from 2007 was being recommended on page 30 while most other product releases are quite recent.

There is excellent coverage of relevant topics for Alfresco WCM. These topics include Advanced Versioning Manager, sandboxes,  virtual server configuration, defining web forms, customizing the editor, workflows, custom workflows, dynamic customization, multi-tenant environments, multi-site configuration, templates and asset reuse, deployment approaches, Alfresco Surf, in-context editing, web scripts, integration with external systems (Liferay, Drupal, J2EE web applications), Alfresco framework (security, video transcoding, image transformation, advanced search, metadata extraction), and administration (data backup, upgrading, maintenance, authorization, resetting the entire repository, migrating servers).

I like books that provide recommendations based on practical considerations and experience. This book provides such recommendation for workflows among several topics. For example, it discusses performance impact of number of workflow instances.

Areas of Improvement

The book has several minor issues related to typos, grammar, and similar concerns. As these issues may have escaped the review process, I am sharing here what I noticed. I am inserting my suggested corrections in [ ] below.

Page 26 has, “It is designed in [for] non-critical Environments.” Page 127 has, “Rendition templates simplifies [simplify]and accelerates [accelerate]“. Page 230 has, “only [a] few files.” Page 256 has this tautological sentence: “you can create as many web projects as you can [desire/wish/want].”

The text has some instances, which probably make things difficult for readers. The first figure on page 11 introducing the Alfresco WCM model is not explained at all. On page 12, the figure is introduced by “One temporary workflow sandbox per active workflow instance per web project:”  but there is no mention of a workflow in the figure and there is no further explanation regarding this.

The  section Alfresco WCM Model on page 11 is probably foundational for the whole book. It would have been nice to have an illustration of the model with a figure which tied together the concepts described in this section. The delivery models are illustrated, and the individual WCM model concepts are illustrated, but no complete WCM model illustration could be found.

The physical architecture diagram on page 25 is not explained. In this diagram, the meaning of arrow direction doesn’t seem obvious. The authoring environment is pointing to receivers and the portal cluster is also pointing to the receivers. Should one interpret it to mean that they are both pushing data to the receivers? It seems that similar looking arrows mean different things in this diagram.

The book lists some situations where WCM could be recommended. It isn’t clear though if it is not recommended when one of these considerations is contradicted. For example, it sounds like WCM is not suitable if anything more than “Submit for Approval” is needed by way of workflow.

On page 222, the zero workflow is discussed but not defined. One can start guessing based on the material what the zero workflow is, but it is not defined. The closest it gets to a definition is in the summary of the chapter, “Implementing ZERO workflow gives the flexibility to submit content using workflows without selecting any user/group.” The reader is left guessing whether that is one feature of the zero workflow or its defining characteristic.

The book has some assertions, which appear simplistic or biased. Page 10 compares Wiki-style and Publishing-style CMSs and some statements appear not to be well informed. I don’t know about all the products listed but here are some thoughts about Drupal. It uses themes and CSS, separating presentation from content. It can allow content revisions and approval workflow on a particular version while another version is live. Whitehouse.gov runs on Drupal and that should refute the “small site” argument. While I get what the authors are trying to say, I wish their arguments were a bit more nuanced. SharePoint doesn’t even get a mention in this mix.

Some assertions in the book appear to be misleading. Page 122 discusses how to dynamically populate drop-down lists, but the example shows how to statically specify the drop-down values in the schema. If this could somehow be dynamic, the text doesn’t explain it. Page 231 asserts, “This feature is very powerful even from a legal audit point of view, wherein you have an ability to reproduce the website as of a specific date.” This statement needs to be qualified by a statement that for a data-driven web-site it may be insufficient without also taking snapshots of the database.

In my experience, WCM systems require two kinds of quality assurance (QA). One kind is the QA of content production, which is accounted for by sandboxes and the approval process. However, this QA happens within one environment. The other kind of QA is needed for the customization of the WCM system. Such changes would include defining new content types, XML changes, web script changes, etc. In most organizations, such changes cannot be made directly in the production environment. There are typically development and/or QA environments for the QA of the development efforts. The book does not address this aspect of WCM.

Conclusion

This review has given more space to the things that could have been better, but most of these things are minor annoyances. However, my take on the book is that it is a handy reference for the exact steps and examples when you are implementing Alfresco WCM. In order to make the best use of this book you may need the knowledge of Alfresco fundamentals and a general understanding of WCM concepts from other resources.

Disclaimers / Disclosures

1. This review represents my independent opinion.
2. I have not been paid for this review.
3. The publisher has provided me with a free copy of the book for writing this review.

Approach

This review does not attempt to provide information about Alfresco or web services outside the context of the book. The review focuses on what the book offers, what it does well, and where it could have done better. Content outline and information about the authors is present on the publisher’s page for the book.

Review

I browsed through the book as soon as I received my review copy to get a feel for its contents. It appeared to a be a handy reference for building applications or integrations with Alfresco using its web service interfaces. While this impression held well as I went through the text, I made some additional observations.

At a high level, this book is organized into three parts – SOAP-based access to Alfresco, REST-based access to Alfresco, and CMIS. I would have loved to see this organization made explicit as Parts 1, 2, and 3. Currently, the description of this organization is hidden in a small paragraph in the preface, which many readers may miss. An introductory chapter relating the high-level concepts and introducing Alfresco would have made the book significantly more reader-friendly. I felt that the book assumes certain knowledge of content management concepts and of Alfresco, but this assumption is not made explicit in “Who this book is for”.

The book does well when it comes to getting into the details of features and capabilities. These details are made accessible to the reader using examples and real products as diverse as Alfresco SDK, FreeMarker, Apache Chemistry, Google Web Toolkit, and MyLyn WikiText parser. The book uses a Book Shop model for a large number of examples, but it also refers to other smaller examples depending on the context.

It also does a good job of introducing the concepts and standards related to SOAP, REST, web scripts, FreeMarker templating, Atom, AtomPub, and CMIS. CMIS deservedly gets a lion’s share in the text as it is a standard means of interaction with any content repository implementing this interface. As many of the content management heavyweights have backed CMIS, it is likely to be supported widely. The discussion on CMIS includes AtomPub and Web Services bindings, CMIS query language, and an example of building a complete CMIS  client application.

The bookshop example is used as a key example in the book. The details of the example appear somewhat contrived to enable explanation of the relevant concepts. There is nothing wrong with an example being contrived in this manner; actually, it serves well to illustrate how to accomplish the desired effects. I just expect the text to make it clear that the example is a contrived one. The book, however, refers to it as a “real case”. I am wondering why I would implement a bookshop web site on Alfresco in real life. There could be a plausible reason but it was not explained. In my mind, I would need some content management requirements to use Alfresco, and I would probably limit the role of Alfresco to that extent in the commercial web site. Further, the example was mostly focused on metadata, and I kept wondering why I wouldn’t just use a database rather than a content repository.

I am not belaboring the bookshop example for its own sake as I admitted that it does well to illustrate the interface details. In my mind, it represents a missed opportunity for the book. In general, the book could have provided more advice on when to do something in addition to how to do it.

Conclusion

Overall, I found the book to be a handy resource for anyone working with Alfresco or content management web services. If you know the specific things that you need to do it can be an excellent resource showing you how to do it. If you need to make choices before implementation, you may need to utilize additional resources. If you are new to Alfresco and content management, you may want to look at additional resources first.