Using Alfresco's blogging, wiki, email alerts and RSS features?

David mentioned using Alfresco's blogging facilities, maybe its wiki
functionality, and its automated email alerts and RSS feeds.

I don't find any of those on the LO Alfresco site. Have they not been
implemented, or am I just not recognising them?

Ah, I see there is a feed (RSS?) from Alfresco itself on my Dashboard.
I looked at customising the dashboard and found a bunch of "dashlets"
that I could add. None of them had anything to do with blogging as far
as I can tell.

In my Profile I find Notifications, with a tickbox for "Email
Notification Feed" but it's unclear to me what this will do and
whether I can customise what notifications I will receive. I think we
used this for awhile to alert people to files being uploaded or
changed or published or something, and that at the time I was
intensely irritated by a flood of emails that I considered irrelevant
to what I was doing. I could be misremembering this; I could be
mistaking other notifications for those from Alfresco, because it was
over a year ago.

I suspect you'll tell me to RTFM for this info, but if it was in the
manuals I skimmed through, I missed it... or it was in the geeky setup
stuff that means nothing to me.

Anyway, I'm finding it hard to evaluate whether any of this stuff is
likely to be useful without being irritating. Much sounds good but
turns out to not be so good upon meeting it in reality.

--Jean

Hi Jean,

David mentioned using Alfresco's blogging facilities, maybe its wiki
functionality, and its automated email alerts and RSS feeds.

I don't find any of those on the LO Alfresco site. Have they not been
implemented, or am I just not recognising them?

All these features are installed and available, but just need
configuring and setting-up once there is a clear specification for
what is wanted.

Ah, I see there is a feed (RSS?) from Alfresco itself on my Dashboard.
I looked at customising the dashboard and found a bunch of "dashlets"
that I could add. None of them had anything to do with blogging as far
as I can tell.

The dashboard is meant to be a pretty important first stop when you
log in, giving you an instant update about various things.

For instance, there can be a dashlet (a "widget") containing tasks
assigned to you, or updating you about the status of tasks you have
assigned to others.

If a blog or wiki is set-up, there can be a dashlet informing you of
recent updates to them.

Similarly to Facebook and other social networking sites, you can
"follow" people too, and stay up to date about their activities.

@Cedric Bosdonnat, could you maybe tell us a little more about the
possibilities in the user dashboard?

In my Profile I find Notifications, with a tickbox for "Email
Notification Feed" but it's unclear to me what this will do and
whether I can customise what notifications I will receive. I think we
used this for awhile to alert people to files being uploaded or
changed or published or something, and that at the time I was
intensely irritated by a flood of emails that I considered irrelevant
to what I was doing. I could be misremembering this; I could be
mistaking other notifications for those from Alfresco, because it was
over a year ago.

What you saw was - IIRC - the ability to turn email alerts on or off
*globally* for you. After that, you can opt in or out (or be opted in
or out) for various notifications. The sending of those notifications
is something that gets configured within the Alfresco platform, and
within the workflows that would be configured.

So it's an inactive feature at the present time until the Wizard of Oz
does his work...

I suspect you'll tell me to RTFM for this info, but if it was in the
manuals I skimmed through, I missed it... or it was in the geeky setup
stuff that means nothing to me.

RTFM! :smiley: No, the problem is that the Alfresco manuals are pretty
generic in their coverage of Alfresco. And this is because Alfresco is
a big ball of clay that can be molded to whatever purpose a company or
organization wants. So the features that work and the way they work
will vary according to the particular configuration of their Alfresco
platform.

So, once configured, a LibreOffice-specific contributor's manual would
be rather important once the platform has been configured. And, for
the docs team, it really would be useful to have a docs team-specific
section in the contributor's guide covering how the docs team uses
Alfresco.

Anyway, I'm finding it hard to evaluate whether any of this stuff is
likely to be useful without being irritating. Much sounds good but
turns out to not be so good upon meeting it in reality.

I think a lot would depend on how well the platform was configured.

It would be useful/important/essential to involve Cedric Bosdonnat and
Jeff Potts in this process.

Cedric's already on the list. I'm going to approach Jeff to see
whether he has available time to monitor the docs team list and
comment/suggest in the Alfresco-related threads.