Navigating Social Office

Upon first logging in to Social Office, you'll notice that you're directed to your Home Page. Under your name at the top of the page you'll see three options, Home, Profile, and Mail.

Home

This is the user's home page. This is where users are directed each time they log in to Social Office. It's here that users can find relevant information on what's going on each day as well as track announcements, activities, and tasks.

Illustration 2: Personal Home Page of the Admin user

The left column contains the Sites portlet as well as the Contacts portlet. The center column contains three aggregation portlets: Announcements, Activities, and Tasks. The right column shows Today's Events and Weather. You can remove each of these applications from your home page by clicking the x in the upper right hand corner of the application. To add an application back (or add a new application) simply click the Applications tab at the top of the page. This is located between Control Panel and Layout. You can also move the applications to different locations on the page by selecting the title of the application and dragging and dropping them onto a column of the page.

You can also change the layout of the page if you don't like the default three-column layout. To do this, click the Layout button at the top of the page. Don't worry, we'll give you full details on layouts in the next chapter.

That's the overall view of a user's personal home page. Let's dive deeper and take a look at the functions of each application on this page.

Sites

In Social Office, Sites are collections of Users who have a common interest. Each Site is pre-populated with collaboration pages allowing you to quickly start collaborating with others. You can create a site for any project or department that requires collaboration between users. For example, a company could create a site specifically for the marketing team, research team, or HR department. To drill down even further, the marketing team could create sites for projects A, B, and C. The great thing about Social Office is that as soon as a site is no longer needed (say project A has been successfully launched) that site can easily be deleted and a new site created for the next project.

This portlet is an aggregation of all of the sites to which a user belongs. Initially, you willy ou'll want to click Add site. If you know a site has already been added, you can click Open Sites to see a list of sites that are available for you to join. To go back to our example, If a user creates content in the site for project A, and is then re-assigned to project B, the user simply leaves the project A site and joins the project B site. All the content that this user created for project A will remain in the project A site—and the user will now have access to everything in project B. This allows him or her to immediately start learning and contributing to the team.

Contacts

Here you'll find a list of all of your contacts within Social Office. Contacts are people you added to your network within Social Office. To add a contact, simply click the Add Contact button at the top right corner of the portlet.

Announcements

The Announcements portlet lists all the announcements that are relevant to you. An announcement is any message that a user wishes to share with others in Social Office. Anyone can create an announcement. When creating an announcement, you choose the scope, display, and expiration dates. The scope is used to define who within social office receives the announcement. This can be everyone, All Site Owners, or all users within a specific site. As an example, this is great for project managers who wish to share a message with every user within a specific site or for Admins who have an important announcement for all users within Social Office.

Activities

The Activities portlet aggregates all the recent activities that are relevant to you. An activity is any change or update that a user made while logged into Social Office. For example, if the admin of the marketing site creates a wiki on how to interact with advertisers and you're part of the Marketing site, then an activity is displayed indicating that an event took place. In this application, activities are scoped in three ways: by sites you belong to, by the activities of your friends within Social Office, and by your own activities. The advantage of this is that users can quickly see what's happened since they last logged in to Social Office.

Illustration 3: Activities FeedTasks

Tasks are assignments that are in various stages of completion. They can be assigned to specific people within Social Office. The Tasks portlet allows you to view all of the tasks that others assigned to you, as well as all the tasks that you assigned to others.

Today's Events

Today's Events will give you a quick overview of all of the public events for each site that you belong to. These events are pulled from the calendars of those sites. See the Calendar section in the Sites chapter to learn about creating new events.

Weather

This lists the weather for cities that you choose. By default it lists 90210, Chicago, Frankfurt, and Rome. To change the default cities, simply click the Configuration button and select Preferences. To search for a city, type the desired city name or zip code into the search box at the bottom of the portlet. Doing this will open up a new window that displays the current weather for the city or zip code you're searching.

Profile

Clicking Profile will take you to your profile page. Your profile page is basically a resume that lets other users in Social Office know your contact information as well as different projects that you have worked on. To edit this click Edit Profile and Edit Projects in the lower left hand corner under your picture.

Illustration 3: Profile

Activities

This is the same as the Activities portlet on your home page. It aggregates all of the recent activities for your sites, your friends, and you. The benefit of having an activities feed on your profile page is that when other users in Social Office navigate to your profile page, they can see what you and your friends have been up to recently.

Mail

Social Office offers a mail client. This is great because it means you have the convenience of not having to log in to another server or use another application to check and send your email. Currently, Social Office can integrate with any mail server that uses the IMAP protocol, as well as Google's GMail service.

Illustration 6: Default view of Social Office's email client. In order to check and receive email in Social Office you'll need to configure the mail portlet settings. This is where you'll configure your email accounts. To start click Configure email accounts. Next choose Add a Mail Account or Add a Gmail Account and follow the directions. After you have successfully added an email account, when navigating to the mail page, you'll be presented with the option to Check your email or configure email accounts.

Social Office also provides a global navigation area at the top right of the screen. This is one way to navigate away from your personal page to other areas of Social Office.