Liferay Social Office is a social collaboration solution for the enterprise. From the start, the goal of Social Office was to allow people to collaborate effectively and efficiently. Beginning with the installation, and continuing on into the product itself, Social Office is very user friendly. Current version is 1.5b. The version 2.0 will be ready at the end of Q4, 2009.
What are new features on Social Office 1.5b?
Contacts: Contacts help users keep track of people both inside and outside the organization.
Tasks: With tasks, you can create and assign tasks to yourself or your contacts, and you can also track tasks and completion status.
Today's Events: Users can now view all calendar events from all of their Sites in a single place on their Home page.
Weather: A simple weather module has been added to the personal Home page near the calendar so that users can prepare for upcoming events.
Profiles: Each user can fill out their own online resume-style profile that can help members discover expertise in the organization.
Site Home: Includes Bookmarks, RSS Feeds, Recent Documents and a listing of the Site's calendar events for the day.
Related Content: Sites in Social Office automatically display related documents, forum threads, blogs, wiki entries, and users based on the tags found on the content currently being browsed.
Search: Search across all Sites on the server or within a specific Site. Social Office's federated search combines results from all types, including documents, forum threads, blogs, wiki entries, events, and users.
Where is a real demo?
Liferay Social Office 1.5 beta is available for demo at http://liferay.cignex.com
Server URL: http://liferay.cignex.com:9090
Accounts from LDAP:jane/jane
Or you can create a new account on fly.
Where is the download package?
Liferay-portal plus SO portlet and SO theme working fine
You can download it from http://liferay.cignex.com/palm_tree/book/liferay-portal-5.2.3-so.zip
Note that the port: 9090
Account: admin/admin
How to build your own Social Office?
Social Office is a social collaboration on top of the portal—a full virtual workspace that streamlines communication and builds up group cohesion. All components are tied together seamlessly, which gets everyone on the same page by sharing the same look and feel. Especially, the dynamic activity tracking gives us a birds-eye view of who has been doing what and when within each individual site. Social Office is not another separate download bundle, but a specific instance of Liferay portal. (Refer to the book: http://www.amazon.com/Liferay-Portal-5-2-Systems-Development/dp/1847194702)
In general, in order to build your own Social Office, you would do the following tasks:
- Develop the Social Office theme
- Add mail and chat portlets
- Build Social Office with portlets
- Hook portal properties and custom JSP files into Social Office
(to be continued...)
- By
Dr. Jonas Yuan
Architect and Author at CIGNEX, USA Office
