Upload Shared Drives

[dalkeith]

Hi. I don't know if this is the appropriate forum for this request, but if it is, great.

Our company has two different content management systems, Alfresco and IBM's ECM. We also have a large number of documents on shared drives throughout our organization. What our management wants to do is get the files off the network and into content management, some of them going to Alfresco and the rest to ECM. My question is, is there a utility of some kind that we can use to iterate over the shared drives and upload both the directory hierarchy (as folders in Alfresco or ECM) and the documents. We'd also like to be able to determine at upload time whether the documents should be major or minor versioned or recreated if they already exist. So does something like this exist?

[villdre]

Hi - there are a couple of things that you might find useful to different extents.

First: Alfresco's Bulk Import Tool

Using the Bulk Import tool | Alfresco Documentation 

This allows you to import entire folder structures (and metadata in XML form). But you would first need to FTP/SCP the folders onto the server's file system. We use this extensively for importing thousands of scanned documents, and it is pretty quick.

Second: Alfresco Office Services (AOS).

Mapping a network drive to Alfresco (Windows users) | Alfresco Documentation 

You can map the Alfresco repository as a network share drive. Then you can copy folders from one drive to the other. This will be somewhat slow, and may not be optimal if the number of documents is large.

Hope this helps

Vipul.

[cesarista]

Hi:

Regarding the first solution, it is not strictly necessary to do a FTP/SCP to local folders. You can mount an external drive in your Alfresco server via CIFS or Webdav. Probably the read throughput it is a little bit worse but Filesystem Bulk Import is very much faster that other solutions based on Alfresco as a network drive (CIFS, FTP, NFS...) . The only case that you will need to copy via SCP previously is if you use inplace bulks in Enterprise Edition. 

Regards.

--C.