Steps to build and utilize the Live Discussion

What is this post about?
This post is all about Live Discussion Addon project that I have created for Repository Browser of Alfresco Share. Below details explain what is the project about and how can you utilize it in Alfresco Share

What is Live Discussion Addon?
It is a project created to add "Live Discussion" capability for Repository Browser in Alfresco Share 4.0 Community Edition. As you may know that Alfresco Explorer provides "Start Discussion" functionality for all the files and folders which allows users to create topic and post on those topics. Well with this addon, I try to expose the same functionality in Alfresco Share and giving it the property of 'Liveliness' on to it.

What does it do?
The Live Discussion Addon mainly allows users to perform following actions

• Create new discussion topic on a folder Or file
• View posts sorted by discussion topic
• Post reply on topic
• Invite other users to join the discussion
• View discussion invitation sent to you by other users and navigate to that topic
• Go to discussions for a particular file or folder from Repository browser

Show it working...

Picture says a thousand words. Without writing much on how it works here is a demo video on vanilla Alfresco Share instance deployed on Tomcat server.

NOTE: THIS ADDON REQUIRES INTERNET WORKING TO DOWNLOAD JQUERY JS FILES

How can I use it?

Steps to install the code

1. Download the live-discussion-alfresco.jar and live-discussion-share.jar files from http://code.google.com/p/alfresco-live-discussion/downloads/list

2. Copy live-discussion-alfresco.jar to WEB-INF/lib folder of alfresco web application. <ALFRESCO_HOME>/tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/lib for tomcat application server

3. Copy live-discussion-share.jar to WEB-INF/lib folder of share web application. <ALFRESCO_HOME>/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/lib for tomcat application server

It is that simple to install. If you want to tweak the functionality you can checkout the source code from http://code.google.com/p/alfresco-live-discussion/source/checkout

Steps to build from source for Tomcat application Server
1. Download Live Discussion - Alfresco and Live Discussion - Share project folder from SVN located http://code.google.com/p/alfresco-live-discussion/source/checkout
2. Edit the build.properties of both the project to point tomcat.work.home to tomcat home directory <ALFRESCO_HOME>/tomcat
3. Navigate to project folder for each project and execute > ant task. This will build jar file and deploy in respective WEB-INF/lib directories of alfresco and share web application
4. Alternatively build file also contains the amp deployment task which can be utilized.

Let me know your thoughts after using it and if you think it adds business value to Alfresco Share product