Getting started with Alfresco

During my internship at TGR, one of the project's requirements was indexing and managing documents, and that was my first experience with Alfresco,  which is an open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM), it combines a collection of content-centric technologies like Document Management (DM), Records Management (RM), and other technologies that should make your life, if your field of work is Content Management, easier.

Customizing Alfresco can be a bit tricky, and hard to grasp at first, but after doing it few times, you start to get the feel of it, and this post, as well as the future articles about Alfresco, are all here for you to get there.

Before you can customize Alfresco, you will need to get your development environment in order, so, first things first : I will show you how to obtain the Software Development Kit (SDK), and how to set it up in eclipse.

Prerequisites
Make sure you have the following developement tools installed first : 

• JDK 1.6.X.
• Eclipse IDE 3.2+ (Recommended) .

Obtaining the SDK

You can either download the SDK from SDK Download Page at SourceForge, or check out the source code and build it. The SVN URL is : svn://svn.alfresco.com.

Setting up the SDK
Once downloaded, our next step is setting up the SDK in Eclipse :

1. Start Eclipse.
2. Select "File -> import".
3. Choose "General -> Existing Projects into WorkSpace".
4. Choose "Select root directory", and click on "Browse".
5. Navigate to the root directory where you unpacked Alfresco SDK, and select OK.
6. The Alfresco Projects are listed under "projects".

Only "SDK AlfrescoRemote" and "SDK AlfrescoEmbedded" are required, but it's a good idea to include the other SDK Samples in order to see how it works, and get the feel of it.

If everything went well, the SDK should be now up and working, in the next article we will see the first example on how to use it in order to customize Alfresco.