Alfresco Office Services (AOS) allows you to access Alfresco directly from your Microsoft Office applications.
Installing Alfresco Office Services allows Microsoft Office Suite applications (for example, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) to interact with Alfresco similar to SharePoint. This feature allows you to edit Office documents in Alfresco Share and to modify Office files without checking them in and out. Alfresco locks the file while it is being modified and releases the lock when the file is saved and closed.
It is important to note the URL required to access Alfresco from a Microsoft Office application. For more information, see Using Alfresco from Microsoft Office. The following diagram shows the architecture of AOS in relation to an Alfresco installation:
Communication is over HTTP with either the repository (through Alfresco Share) or directly from a Microsoft Office application.
If you are using a proxy server to handle SSL communication, the proxy handles the communication with Share and Microsoft Office through an AJP port (if you are using Tomcat). For more information about setting up a proxy server, see Configuring SSL. The architecture is as follows:
AOS replaces and enhances the Microsoft SharePoint Protocol Support that was available in previous versions of Alfresco.