Hello Liferay team,

Our team has been testing Social Office for the last couple of weeks and I must say I am impressed! I'm amazed how feature rich each of the components are when compared to other products. I have used similar products and have found the components to be very lacking in features.

The Creole support in the Wiki makes it very easy for documenting our procedures. We have been using the Forum mainly to discuss issues that we have with the systems we support. The Blog has been pretty much a free for all for anyone to talk about any projects they are currently working on. With the Calendar we have been tracking when team members are on vacation. And Activities makes it really simple to see what everyone is working on.

The inline chat is a very nice feature as well. But I am getting feedback that its very hard to notice it when a new message comes in. It would be nice to somehow enhance the chat so that it is easier to notice when a new message comes in. I know it plays a sound but we have our machines are muted most of the time in the office.

Keep up the good work! I can't wait to see what's in store for the next beta!

Hi Jamie,

Thanks so much for your generous feedback. Do you have any suggestions as to how to make the chat notification improved? Would flashing the bottom bar be too obnoxious?

Hi Bryan,

We use a Firefox plugin for a monitoring app called Nagios. Whenever a new alert comes in for Nagios the plugin alerts us by flashing from black to yellow (or red) for about 2 seconds and then it stays yellow. We were wondering if the SO chat could be modified to do something similar. Here is a screenshot of the Nagios alert for your reference.

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NagiosAlert.jpg (14.3k)

Hi Jamie,

The Chat portlet has been updated since we released Social Office. Here's a screenshot for what it looks like when you have messages. What do you think?

Attachments:

Picture 1.png (4.0k)

Hi Bryan,

That should help. It makes it more visible but yet it is still unobtrusive. We'll have to use it to know for sure but it definitely looks like a step in the right direction.

Feel free to send me a link to the next beta of Social Office and we'll get that tested for you.