Deploying Alfresco Connector for Content Intelligence

The Alfresco Connector for Content Intelligence (CIC) provides knowledge retrieval capabilities by connecting your content repository, Alfresco Content Services (ACS), to Knowledge Discovery. Knowledge Discovery allows you to apply machine learning to your content repository.

The connector consists of three services:

  • Live Ingester — ingests repository events in real time.
  • Bulk Ingester — batch-ingests existing content from the repository database. It is installed as a oneshot service and is not started automatically; run it on demand for the initial load or to recover after downtime. It is only installed when the repository database is reachable.
  • Nucleus Sync — synchronises Alfresco users and groups into Nucleus. Upstream marks this component as not yet production-ready; it is deployed and started by this role, but treat it as preview.

CIC requires no ACS repository extension: repository events are consumed directly from the alfresco.repo.event2 ActiveMQ topic.

You can get the most up-to-date product documentation for the Alfresco Connector in the Alfresco Connector for Content Intelligence documentation.

Prerequisites

  • Alfresco Content Services Enterprise Edition 7.4 or later (Community Edition is not supported)
  • Active subscription and credentials for the Content Intelligence service

Deployment Steps

  1. Configure at least one host inside the inventory file for the cic group.
  2. Provide your Content Intelligence credentials and related configuration parameters/URLs in the vars/cic.yml file.
  3. Provide cic_remote_client_secret in the vars/secrets.yml file. If the ACS administrator password differs from the default (admin), also set cic_alfresco_password there — it is the credential the connector authenticates to ACS with. Make sure to learn about Ansible Vault integration if you are doing a production deployment.
  4. Run the Ansible playbook as for a standard deployment. Please follow the deployment guide for more details.

Any Alfresco Digital Workspace (ADW) UI configuration required to surface Knowledge Discovery features is product- and version-specific — refer to the Content Intelligence documentation.

Verifying the Deployment

After the deployment is complete:

  1. Check that the connector services are running:

    systemctl status alfresco-cic-connector-live-ingester
systemctl status alfresco-cic-connector-nucleus-sync

    The bulk ingester is installed but not started; run it on demand:

    systemctl start alfresco-cic-connector-bulk-ingester

  2. Create or update a document in the repository and check the ingestion logs:

    journalctl -u alfresco-cic-connector-live-ingester -f

Source Code

The cic_connector Ansible role is available as part of the Alfresco Platform Collection.