Alfresco 6 Annotations – Adding OpenAnnotate to the Application Development Framework (ADF)

As a modern browser-based solution on Alfresco for Annotations, OpenAnnotate can provide viewing and annotation capabilities within Alfresco Application Development Framework (ADF), for both PDF and Video content.  We’ve already discussed using OpenAnnotate within ADF, in our initial review of the Alfresco Application Development Framework and Angular.  This post will describe in more detail the integration as well as provide a quick video showing annotation configured for an out of the box implementation for Alfresco 6.

Alfresco Annotations with OpenAnnotate

OpenAnnotate can view and annotate documents in either a PDF document format or an MP4 video format.  OpenAnnotate also supports various browser media formats including JPEG, PNG and TIFF.  For documents that are not in these formats, including Word and other office formats, OpenAnnotate can provide viewing and annotation based on the document PDF rendition provided by Alfresco Transformation Services or other products like Adlib or Nuance.  OpenAnnotate provides many modern capabilities not found in traditional annotation tools including:

• Completely browser based requiring no application or client install
• Support of Adobe’s XFDF standard to avoid proprietary annotation formats as well as offline annotations
• Complete integration and support with Alfresco renditions or native content
• Support for both document, audio and video annotations
• Support for Annotation and Redaction (Version and Permanent)
• Support of concurrent annotations allowing multiple users to annotate one document simultaneously (including chat) while seeing each others annotations.

Starting from Alfresco’s example Content App using ADF, TSG provides an implementation of OpenAnnotate as a replacement of the View action in the Alfresco Application Development Framework.  The new action replaces the “View Document” with “View/Annotate in OpenAnnotate”, that will open a document in OpenAnnotate for viewing and annotating.

With the add-on, all documents and videos that would have been previewed with the ADF’s default viewer can now be viewed and annotated with OpenAnnotate.

If you are interested in adding annotation capability to Alfresco Application Development Framework (ADF) or have any other questions, please contact us.