Abstract: This paper presents an extension of the Al-fresco document management system that automatically imports document hierarchy templates from scripts. Al-though the similar solutions already exist, they are plat-form dependent and still in the development stage. The proposed solution uses platform independent Java applic-ation to remotely import document hierarchy into the Al-fresco repository and can be easily extended to accom-modate for different template formats and/or repository content models.Keywords – Alfresco, document management system, ex-tension, importing1. INTRODUCTIONA document management system is an information sys-tem that enables initiation, preparation, establishment, us-age, revision, archiving and deletion of documents. In other words, it is an information system that is used for life-cycle management of electronic and paper-based doc-uments.A document can be defined as a fixed and structured amount of information that can be managed and inter-changed as a unit between users and systems [1].According to the same source, there are four types of doc-uments: single documents, compound documents, docu-ment aggregations and document sets. Single document represents elementary form of information carrier in doc-ument management systems. It consists of the basic docu-ment and the associated metadata. Compound document is the result of the composition of multiple documents of various types. Metadata are assigned to the compound document as a whole, while its components do not have separate metadata. Document aggregation is a set of docu-ments, each with its metadata. It has its own metadata, but does not need to have its own document. Document set is a set of documents with assigned metadata. While the set itself has assigned metadata, it does not have its own doc-ument. Furthermore, documents can be linked and can have different versions.Each document is assigned metadata that describe its content or other characteristics. Document management systems can request users to enter metadata or can automatically extract metadata from its content [2]. The Alfresco [3] is the main part of the software compon-ent of a document management system. It uses open source technologies (it is licensed under GNU General Public License) and open standards. It can be relatively easily customized and extended by modifying XML docu-ments, modifying source code or implementing web ser-vices that communicate with it. It can be also easily integ-rated with other systems using open standards.While developing document management systems that are deployed in different organizations, authors have noticed that the automatic importing of document hierarchy from templates is one of the key functions that was missing. This paper describes an extension of the Alfresco, a spe-cific document management system, that implements this function.The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews Alfresco document management system. Section 3 describes developed tool that imports document hier-archy into Alfresco repository. Finally, the last section gives concluding remarks.2. ALFRESCOApart from document management, Alfresco supports web content management (managing files and content specifically intended to be delivered to the web), digital asses management (managing graphics, video, and audio), records management (managing content as a legal record) and imaging (capturing, tagging, and routing images of documents from scanners). Nevertheless, the attention is paid to its document management function.This section reviews Alfresco document management sys-tem: its content model, functions, software architecture and technologies used in its development. 2.1. CONTENT MODELThe Alfresco content model is used to represent types of content within its repository. The Alfresco content model is built using: types (used to model business objects, they have properties and can inherit a parent type), properties (represent metadata associated with a particular type), property types (describe the fundamental types of data the repository will use to store properties), constrains (used to restrict the values of a property), associations (used to define relationships between types, i.e. hierarchy of folders) and aspects (a mechanism to extend content mod-el with properties and associations by attaching them to content types when and where they are needed).One of the built-in content models is the Content Domain Model which describes Content, Spaces and predefined set of metadata. First two concepts roughly correspond to single document and document set respectively.2.2. FUNCTIONSDocument life-cycle management is implemented with the support for different structural types of documents, as-
