We’ve blogged about the Ingres/Alfresco combination before, but recently Ingres announced the release of Icebreaker, a full ECM appliance that combines a solid Linux OS base with Ingres DBMS and Alfresco 3.0.1.  Today, I installed the appliance and started poking around the web administration interface.  I must say that I’m really impressed.

Here’s some of the stuff I really like about this appliance:

  • Very easy to install.  This installation took almost no effort at all on my part.  I created a VMWare virtual machine with enough RAM and hard drive space and booted the CD.  The graphical installer handled the rest, including partitioning, network configuration, and passwords for root and ingres users.  When the machine finishes rebooting after installation, the web administration interface is already ready to rock.
  • Alfresco License management made simple.  Just upload a license file into the web admin interface and presto, your Alfresco license is properly installed.  Heck, I wish Alfresco would implement something just like this.  Sometimes it’s way too confusing to figure out which directory in the deployment the license file needs to be copied into.  Doesn’t seem to be working at the moment, but just having the UI there is already promising.
  • Alfresco AMP management made simple.  Just like with licenses, just upload the AMP file in the admin interface and you’re done.  I haven’t gotten a chance to actually try it but just having an interface like this is already a major improvement over Alfresco’s own AMP command-line tools.  I haven’t gotten to try it, but again this looks very promising.
  • Automagic backup and restore.  Backup and rollback functionality is, if I remember correctly, one of the main advantages that Ingres states that it has over other databases that Alfresco supports such as MySQL.  The web interface makes scheduled backups easy to configure.  It even allows the administrator to configure where to send the backups, including NFS, Samba/CIFS, and a mountable filesystem (label).
  • Automatic updates.  This is another feature that I haven’t gotten a chance to see in action yet but if it works as promised, it’ll be pretty damn slick.

Here are some things I’d like to see the appliance be able to do:

  • Extend user management features into Alfresco.  At this point, there’s no way to manage Alfresco users through the web admin for the appliance.  But as we’ve seen for ourselves in integrating Sun IDM, such functionality is not trivial.  =(
  • Overview of application health.  During our evaluation, Alfresco actually failed to run and when we tried to get to the login, we got a 404.  We needed to restart the tomcat service to get that working again.  It would be nice if the web admin had a page displaying the basic “health” of the various components (database, application server, Alfresco, and Share).
  • Web content management.  Maybe this is a bit out-of-scope since it is an ECM appliance, but Alfresco can support web content management and we’d love to see it in the appliance, at least as a module/add-on.

This is just an initial glance.  At this point, some of the features haven’t worked quite as promised for us.  For example, at the moment we’re still having trouble with the Alfresco license management feature.  But we’re willing to assume for the moment that these might be our own misunderstandings of the appliance and its configuration rather than bugs.  In any case, this all looks really good.  The initial Ingres/Alfresco bundle was underwhelming; it was just Ingres and Alfresco with an installer for Linux.  The full Icebreaker appliance offers so much more and I think it definitely answers the question of what Ingres has to bring to Alfresco.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Alfresco, Content Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.