Implement Moodle in your business to streamline your interview, training, and internal communication processes.
The Repository integration allows admins to set up external content management systems and use them to complement Moodle’s own file management system. Using this integration you can now manage content outside of Moodle and publish it to the system once the document or other content is ready. The Portfolio integration enables users to store their Moodle content in an external e-portfolio system to share with evaluators, peers, and others.
The repository system of Moodle 2 allows you to store and manipulate content outside of Moodle and easily add it to courses. By managing content outside of Moodle, you can provide users with a more robust editing experience. Many organizations utilize workflows and approval processes to ensure the accuracy of the content used in the LMS. A content repository can help you manage that process, and then make the content available on Moodle when it is ready for final publication.
Alfresco is an open source, enterprise content management system, similar in many ways to Microsoft Sharepoint or EMC’s Documentum. Alfresco has seen widespread adoption over the last few years as more people begin to recognize the advantages of open source software. We will start by installing Alfresco, then look at how to link it to Moodle and add content to a Moodle site. At the end of this section, we’ll take a look at Alfresco’s content conversion services as a tool to ensure content is reliably converted to web friendly formats.
To get us started, we’ll install Alfresco on our test system to experiment with the integration. Alfresco runs on a different architecture than Moodle. Alfresco requires a Java application server instead of PHP. Fortunately, there are installers available on the Alfresco site that include everything we will need to develop a test system on your local computer.
To install Alfresco, run through the following steps:
You now have a full-functioning open source enterprise content management system installed on your personal computer. Alfresco has a lot of power for manipulating and sharing documents, but we will only focus on a few features for now. There are a lot of books available to help you learn how to use the more advanced features in Alfresco (a few of them from this publisher as well).
To allow users to access your new Alfresco repository, you will need to configure Moodle to allow access to the repository. The new repository architecture of Moodle 2 enables developers to create plugins to connect Moodle with other systems. Each system will have its own type of plugin to allow a direct connection between Moodle and the system. To enable Moodle to talk to an external repository, we need to enable the plugin and any associated options.
To enable the Alfresco repository plug-in, go through the following steps:
If you get the following error: Notice SOAP extension must be enabled for Alfresco plugin, then make sure that the SOAP library is enabled in your php.ini file. The location of the file will vary depending on the system you are using. Find the php.ini file and un-comment the extension=php_soap.dll line. Then restart Moodle and this should solve the error.
You have just configured the Alfresco repository plugin to enable Moodle to talk to Alfresco. When you bring up the file picker in a course or at the site level, you should now see the Alfresco repository as an option.
In the next article, we will configure the Google Docs plugin for Moodle, but there are a number of other plugins. Picasa and Flickr are two photo repositories on the web where many people share their photos. Wikimedia and YouTube are two very popular sources of media as well. Enable one or two of these additional plugins to practice configuring Moodle on your own.
In Moodle 2, repository integrations are read-only. The Moodle design team decided the repository integration should only read from repositories, and the portfolio integration should save content to portfolio repositories. So you can’t add content directly to Alfresco with the default plugin. To add content to the repository, we need to use the repository’s own interface, then we can add it to Moodle. With Alfresco, that interface is either the Alfresco Explorer or Alfresco Share.
To add content to the repository using Share, run through the following steps:
You have now added a file to your Alfresco repository. We’ve explored a very simple example of adding a single file with no workflow or approval needed. You can use Share to create content, share it with colleagues, and use versioning and other features to manage the content creation process.
Now that you’ve added a simple file to Alfresco Share, try some of the other features. Check out a file for editing, change it and check it back in for others to use, or create some content directly in Share.
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