Appnovation specializes in open-source technologies like Drupal and Alfresco. They integrate these platforms to provide websites, intranets, mobile apps, and document management. Drupal focuses on presentation while Alfresco manages processes and content. Canopy replicates content between them, allowing content to be pushed between the systems. It provides the benefits of both platforms through a REST API integration without modifying their data models.

2. About Appnovation
We
specialize
in
the
use
of
leading
open-­‐source
technologies

3. Appnovation provides unparalleled expertise in creating
• Consumer facing and B2B websites
• Corporate and gov’t intranets
• Enterprise level back-end document management and workflow
processes
• Mobile website optimization
• Cross platform mobile applications
• eLearning platforms
• Ecommerce
• Locations: Vancouver, BC & Atlanta, GA

4. Clients

5. Why Drupal?
• Thousands of modules and a large developer community
• Lightweight webserver footprint
• Highly scalable and expandable
• Cloud hosting ready
• Enterprise hosting and support from Acquia
• Supports Multi-site and Multilingual deployments
• Ease of use for non-technical users
• Great in-context editing capabilities
• Extremely Secure

6. Why Drupal?

7. Why Alfresco?
• Very rich document repository system with many great out of
the box features ie. Versioning, Document transformation
• Excellent document search and retrieval capabilities using a
Lucene (or Solr) document indexer
• Complex workflow structure can support any type of
organization structure
• Great records management capabilities
• Highly scalable and expandable and cloud hosting ready
• Highly Secure
• Supports open standards (CMIS, Web Services, Rest Api’s,
webdav, CIFS, JSON, JSR 168, RSS, Atom, etc…
• Enterprise Support from Alfresco

8. Why Integrate?
Integrated
Solu8on
(Canopy)
• Enables
process
AND
presenta8on
of
content
Alfresco
Drupal
• Focuses
on
the
processes
around
• Focuses
on
the
presenta8on
of
content
content

9. Why They are Good Together?
• World class Open Source document repository application
combined with highly scalable and popular Open Source
website development tool allows for the best of both worlds
• Alfresco compliments Drupal by providing a feature rich UI for
managing web assets, as well as providing full document and
knowledge management for entire organizations.
• Drupal as the frontend provides Alfresco with a highly flexible
presentation layer that can be used to build websites that would
be difficult with Alfresco alone

10. Comparison: Canopy and CMIS

11. High Level Comparison of Canopy and CMIS
• CMIS
• Documents are maintained only in Alfresco
• Documents can be linked to a custom Drupal Content Type
• Content cannot be “pushed” to Drupal from Alfresco
• Canopy
• Documents are replicated across both Alfresco and Drupal
• Documents are mapped to existing node types within Drupal (example:
blog posts, articles, etc).
• Content can be “pushed” in either direction

12. Integrating Alfresco and Drupal with CMIS
• Use the Drupal “CMIS” contributed module as a starting point
• Create custom Drupal Content type such as “Alfresco
Document” which includes a link to a CMIS document that is
stored within Alfresco repository
• Content remains in Alfresco, with links to that content stored in
Drupal

13. Simple Alfresco/Drupal Integration using CMIS

14. Integrating Alfresco and Drupal with Canopy
• Canopy custom code is installed on both Alfresco and Drupal
• Adds 2 new Actions to the Alfresco repository: “Sync” and “Sync
to Preview”
• Data is pushed and replicated on Drupal into existing Drupal
Content Types
• Data can also be pushed and replicated from Drupal to Alfresco

15. Diagram of Integrating Alfresco/Drupal using Canopy

16. Video Presentation...

17. Case Study: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Architectural
Proof of Concept

18. Requirements
• AHRQ was looking to understand how to best leverage Drupal
and Alfresco together in a complex Enterprise environment.
• The Drupal / Alfresco solution also needed to work with existing
Enterprise technologies such as SSO, and operate across
separate Cloud environments.
• Specific features, functions, and capabilities that are critical to
support their business needed to work.

19. POC Architecture

20. Results
• Appnovation and Acquia delivered a fully functioning Canopy
POC that demonstrated the stable and feature rich integration
between Drupal and Alfresco in the context of AHRQ business.
• Canopy architecture integrated seamlessly with SSO, and
operated across two separate Cloud hosting environments.
• This POC clearly demonstrated how to deliver the best value
from both Drupal and Alfresco to AHRQ.

21. Canopy Architecture

22. Canopy Stack

23. Technical Details
• Data is passed between Alfresco and Drupal using a custom
REST JSON interface
• Drupal JSON web service written as a Drupal module
• Alfresco JSON service written as webscripts
• Can setup custom sync Rules using Alfresco rules system

24. Canopy Services

25. Architectural Benefits
• Simple JSON REST API integrates easily into both Alfresco and
Drupal.
• By replicating data between the 2 applications there are no
weird hacks made to either application's data model or data
access model.
• Because each application can talk with its own database as
they were intended you get the full set of features of each
application as they are meant to work.
• There are many options in terms of scaling the application, for
example you can have a low end Alfresco implementation
combined with a high scale large volume Drupal frontend.

26. Canopy Future Plans
• Plan to open source Canopy code
• Improve customization interface (some customizations are still
at the code level, better to have them in a config file or separate
module)
• More sophisticated authentication mechanism (currently single
user integration).