Working Smarter with

Liferay Social Office

Richard L. Sezov, Jr.

Stephen Kostas

Michelle Hoshi

Working Smarter with Liferay Social Office

Richard L. Sezov, Jr., Stephen Kostas, Michelle Hoshi

Copyright © 2010 by Liferay, Inc.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Introduction11

What can you do with Social Office?11

How is Social Office Different from Liferay Portal?12

Social Office Concepts13

Users13

Applications14

Sites14

Navigating Social Office15

Summary16

2. Getting Started17

Installing the software on your platform17

Using the Windows Installer18

Using the Cross-Platform Zip File19

Installing Social Office for Production Use20

Database Setup20

Social Office Home21

The portal-ext.properties File21

DB222

Derby22

Hypersonic22

Ingres23

MySQL23

Oracle23

PostgreSQL23

SQL Server23

Sybase23

Signing In24

Sign In Options24

OpenID24

Create An Account25

Forgot Password25

Navigating Social Office 25

Home 25

Sites 26

Contacts27

Announcements27

Activities27

Tasks28

Today's Events28

Weather28

Profile28

Activities29

Mail29

My Sites30

The Control Panel30

Navigating the Control Panel30

Using the Control Panel31

Summary32

3. Sites33

Adding a Site33

Browsing Sites33

Managing Permissions for Sites34

Site Roles34

Site Applications34

Calendar34

Importing and Exporting Calendars36

Documents36

Editing a File 38

Blogs40

Forums42

Permissions43

Adding Categories and Mailing Lists43

Using the Forums44

Forums Administrative Functions46

Wikis47

Navigating in the Wiki application48

Getting Started with the Social Office Wiki48

Adding and Editing Wiki Pages49

Page Details50

Members51

Other Site Options52

Adding/Removing Applications52

Layouts52

Announcements53

Chat55

Summary55

4. Control Panel57

Navigating the Control Panel57

Social Office Architecture58

Users58

Roles58

Sites58

User Groups58

Using the Control Panel59

Adding Users59

User Management60

Roles61

Defining Permissions on a Role62

User Groups63

User Groups and Page Templates64

Global Server Settings68

Password Policies69

Settings69

General70

Authentication: General Settings70

Authentication: LDAP71

Global Values71

Single Sign-On76

Authentication: Central Authentication Service (CAS)77

Authentication: NTLM78

Authentication: OpenID78

Authentication: OpenSSO79

Authentication: SiteMinder79

Default User Associations79

Reserved Credentials80

Mail Host Names80

Email Notifications80

Identification80

Miscellaneous: Display Settings80

Monitoring81

Server Administration81

Resources81

Log Levels81

System Properties81

Portal Properties82

Shutdown82

OpenOffice82

Summary82

Preface

Liferay Social Office is Liferay's brand new social collaboration product for the enterprise. We are excited to bring both the product and this book to you, in the hope that you'll be able to use each to enable your teams to work together more efficiently.

Some time ago, we at Liferay were brainstorming some common use cases which Liferay Portal does a good job solving. One of these is team-based collaboration. Many of our customers have used Liferay Portal both inside their enterprises and outside on the Internet to provide a better way of sharing documents and data with the people with whom they work every day. Liferay Portal provides a very flexible solution which allows you to do that. But it can also do much, much more. Because Liferay Portal has that flexibility, the path from the initial install to a robust web site that could be used for collaboration was not always straightforward to the new user. Business users wanted a product they could install and use right away.

This was not the only reason for the new product. Internally, we realized that we needed a product like this ourselves, and that we already had all the features in place to make it possible. We just needed to assemble them together in a way that most optimally supported the scenario of social collaboration, and we wanted to make getting set up as easy as possible for new users.

In this way, Social Office was born. We created the product to provide a simple, out of the box solution for team collaboration. Using Liferay Portal as a base, Social Office provides you with a fantastic array of features that you don't have to spend a lot of time configuring. In fact, you can have a full production environment set up in less time than it takes to brew a pot of coffee.

Though it sounds like this is a brand new product, it's in many ways an older, proven solution as well. Since it uses Liferay Portal as a base, it inherits all the benefits of a mature, stable solution which has been in the marketplace for some time. In addition to this, we've had an early adopter program, and the product is already in production use with multiple customers. It has even received industry recognition: it's in the Gartner magic quadrant for social software, and has been mentioned as the only open source, Java-based solution for collaboration in a comparison review of products in this space.

Since our early adopter program was so successful, we're excited to finally release the product to the general public. Customers who have already started using it have been exceptionally pleased with the results, and you gain the benefit from our collaboration with those early adopters. In fact, this is one of the great things about open source: we've received extensive feedback on the product, including bug fixes and feature requests. Our customers have told us whether things are intuitive or not, and we've incorporated that feedback right back into the product.

This book is for those who are setting up and administering an installation of Liferay Social Office. From installing Social Office to introducing you to its entire feature set, you'll see all of the things Social Office can do to help your team. We hope you'll use it as a tool to get Social Office up, running, and integrated into your enterprise.

Conventions

Sections are broken up into multiple levels of headings, and these are designed to make it easy to find information.

Source code and configuration file directives are presented like this.
If source code goes multi-line, the lines will be \
separated by a backslash character like this.

Tip: This is a tip. Tips are used to indicate a suggestion or a piece of information that affects whatever is being talked about in the surrounding text. They are always accompanied by this gray box and the icon to the left.

Italics are used to represent links or buttons to be clicked on in a user interface and to indicate a label or a name of a Java class.

Bold is used to describe field labels and portlets.

Page headers denote the chapters, and footers denote the particular section within the chapter.

Publisher Notes

It's our hope that this book is valuable to you, and that it's an indispensable resource as you begin to administer a Social Office server. If you need any assistance beyond what's covered in this book, Liferay, Inc. offers training, consulting, and support services to fill any need that you might have. Please see http://www.liferay.com/services for further information about the services we can provide.

As always, we welcome any feedback. If there is any way you think we could make this book better, please feel free to mention it on our forums. You can also use any of the email addresses on our Contact Us page (http://www.liferay.com/contact_us). We are here to serve you, our users and customers, and to help make your experience using Social Office the best it can be.

Author Notes

Special thanks are due to my co-authors, Stephen Kostas and Michelle Hoshi, who turned around their chapter assignments in record time while the product was changing under them. I also cannot underestimate the help of Ryan Parks in quickly answering our calls for help and in giving us further explanation of various features. And I must also make special mention of Stephen Wilburn, who copy edited this document. I thought the text was pretty clean, but he slogged through our hastily written prose with an attention to detail that made it look like monkeys had typed this thing. If you find this book to be readable, it's because of him.

As always, we hope this book is useful to you as you begin your journey with Liferay Social Office!

Rich Sezov

June, 2010