I am really looking forward to the new SO 2.0. I am wondering if the community is aware of any service providers who will be hosting SO implementations as preconfigured installations? I am looking for an easy way to trial project collaboration using SO as a first step to getting buy-in within the organization.

Hi Peter,

We are working on getting an SO SaaS offering off the ground along with some kind of limited free trial or basic offering. No ETA yet.

What do you think you expect pricing-wise for something limited to X sites or priced by user or user tier?

Bryan

Bryan, I guess the pricing that would suit the market really depends on the size of the project ($ value rather than number of users). I suspect much of your user base might be smaller companies and also not-for-profit type of organizations who might have projects that involve quite a few users but are not high $ value (in enterprise terms). That makes it all too difficult to base a pricing formula on some straightforward measure like number of users.

If I was a small company or not-for-profit I would be happy to pay say $50 per project for say 1-10 users and a higher tier for more users. If I was a company putting up large buildings in international locations where efficient communications between stakeholders in various geographical locations could save a lot of costs, I would be happy to pay $500 per project if the solution/process really worked and was backed up with responsive support. The latter scenario is where I have spent much of my previous working life, the former scenario is my current need and I would like the option of being able to access hosts with SO 2.0 ready to be implemented and your SaaS model for sure.

Bryan,

Interesting idea, and there are some important notions to consider.

If you are aiming for a primarily US client base, then this might not be of much concern, but the PATRIOT Act poses significant information security challenges for companies outside the US. You would most likely need to address this publicly in your solution offering. This Act troubles a significant number of my clients who simply choose not to use cloud services or SaaS where mid or end-points are in the US.

cheers,
Trevor

Hi Bryan,

Am I understanding correct that with Social Office 2.0 there will no longer be a community edition available for download?

I hope that I am just misunderstanding the recent news and that in addition to the SaaS and Enterprise editions there will still be a Community Edition available as there was for Social Office 1.5b.

I would appreciate any clarification you can provide.

Nick

Hi Nick,

To be fully honest we are exploring a number of options. Here are the options on the table:

1. Continue to offer AGPL-licensed Social Office 2.0 CE based on Liferay Portal 6.1 CE (1.5b model)
2. Freemium model with Social Office 2.0 that works on Liferay Portal 6.1 CE or EE. Limited to x sites or y users; unlimited Social Office 2.0 available for EE
3. EE-only Social Office 2.0

Separately from these options, we will pursue a SaaS-based Social Office. with flexible pricing options and possibly some free options.

There are a number of factors we are considering:

1. We have not seen strong open source community develop around SO—we suspect this is due to the nature of the product—it's more of a finished product than a developer platform
2. There is added complexity to developing SO for both CE and EE—part of the reason why we went EE-only for 1.6. We got to a point where SO 1.6 was so dependent on Liferay Portal 6.0 EE that we couldn't do otherwise
3. We don't hear a strong sentiment of people wanting to heavily customize Social Office, so source code access is less important.
4. The more we can drive sales of Liferay Portal EE (e.g. by having SO as an EE-only bonus), the more we can invest in the further development of Liferay overall.

Of course we also have to consider that we have indicated that we would have an open source version of Social Office 2.0. The choices here are:

1. Go with open source after all
2. Reward our community members that have been involved with SO or waiting for it with a complimentary license to Social Office EE or SaaS instance (we would determine this by looking at the Forum history)

OK, let the tomato-throwing begin. I welcome your thoughts.

Bryan

Hi Bryan,

I appreciate your honest feedback.

I do hope you pursue option 1. I would have never become involved with Liferay if Social Office hadn't been available. At the time (1.5 years ago) I was evaluating several open source intranet systems and Social Office fit the bill. I could have gone with other solutions but I felt that Liferay was moving the SO product in a good direction. I understood at the time that the source code for SO wasn't easy to make available to the community due to the, at the time upcoming release of LR 6.x., and waited patiently for SO 1.6 CE or 2.0 CE, with the promise that source code would then be made available.

I hear your concern that there hasn't been much developer interest in customizing SO, but I feel you have to seriously consider whether this is due to the fact that source code was never made available for SO 1.5b to allow people to customize it. In my opinion, one of the most limiting growth factors in Social Office development has been Liferay's decision to not release the source code for SO1.5b. Instead, those in the community that are interested in SO, have been forced to either a) make what little changes they can in the .jsp's while eagerly anticipating a new version that would offer full customization, or b) decide that there are too many hoops to jump through to make it work with no access to source code and abandon the idea of using SO all together.

I think you would see a great community grow around Social Office if you would release the code. One look at the SO forums from the beginning show that there was considerable enthusiasm. However when it became clear that Liferay was not going to meet it promises with regard to new versions, people started losing hope and abandoning ship.

There is still a chance to turn this around and I hope you do.

Nick

Hi Bryan,

I would also like to point out that we found out about Liferay Portal through using Social Office 1.0 CE Beta. So I think a Social Office Community presence is an important one as well.

To be honest I was a little surprised when I noticed that SO 2.0 trunk was requiring the Liferay 6.2.x trunk to build now. My assumption was that when 6.1.0 GA1 came out that Social Office would be branched to work with it instead of the Portal trunk. So my only guess is that SO 2.0 needed fixes to Liferay 6.1 post GA1?

If that is the case then I was wondering since Liferay 6.1 GA1 now comes with the new patching-tool, would it be possible to include any post GA1 fixes as a fixpack to GA1? So to run Social Office 2.0 CE you would need Liferay 6.1 GA1 + liferay-fixpack-social-office-1-610 + Social Office 2.0 CE plugins?

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks,
Jamie

Hey Nick,

Thanks for your honest feedback.

Can you email me with your email address so we can discuss further?

Hi,
I was really looking at Social Office. It's really a great product. My concern would be is that in a medical office we cannot use cloud hosting due to patient information. We prefer a package that can be installed locally, and kept on our intranet for security considereations. Our office is small, and cost would be a consideration in purchasing a package, but to have cloud as the only option is something that we could not find acceptable. I Think the marketing of the product as even a stand alone installation package for small business' under 10 employees would be great. I know that many small groups, and solo offices would find great use out of a product like this.

Hi Franklin,

Don't worry, I don't think our SaaS offering would ever be at the expense of our on-premise version.

Brian,

Any update on the SaaS offering for SO? Was just searching for providers but don't see any yet.

Thanks,
Steve

Hi Steve,

Nothing on SaaS yet, but if you need a hosting provider, the folks at OmegaBit work hard and really know Liferay. Would that work for you?

Yes, was looking at their options, but it doesn't mention SO, only the portal. I may not understand the difference well enough, but am looking for SO hosted specifically.

SO runs as an application on the Liferay Portal platform so OmegaBit can take care of you. Talk to Chris Stavros.

Hello Bryan,

I guess I am a little late in responding to this but here are my thoughts.

I agree with Nick option one would be the best in my situation and I would guess most people will likely have the same thoughts. I have been using Liferay for a number of years now. It manages my companies external web site and provides our internal controls for our virtual office. I had tried to use SO in earlier versions but had issues in most cases.

I am currently exploring SO 2.0 and am very excited about it! It meets a need in my company but also addresses a need that I have been dealing with in my partnership communities. I review the source code all the time to resolve issues in set-up. I may end up making a few changes to address specific needs I have. For example, I may want to set up task communications so that it is limited to just site members while my task list updates are not communicated to anybody but me... at least give an option to create a private task. So I would be stuck at this point if I couldn't access the source.

I have also answered several questions that I had during set-up that have not been addressed in the Wiki and forums. I have provided some very limited feedback to other users on the forum to answer questions that I had discovered answers to by reviewing the source code.

Assuming all goes well with my tests and I am able to address a few privacy related issues and one notification issue I will likely expand my use of the product. I most likely would not have gotten to this decision had I not had access to the source. In fact, access to the source allows me to customize in order to meet my requirements. I am happy to participate in the developer groups and if all goes well may expand into the EE version, but none of that would have happened without access to the source.

Just my 2 cents worth... a few days (months) late.

Hi Bryan,

We have build a supplier portal around Liferay for a very specific industry and we plan to expand from this industry to other related industries.
We have a windows based system that about 150 Automotive suppliers use to manage prototype part / shipments.
Recently, we have launched a proof of concept of this application incorporated in Liferay to test the concept and we are having great feedback.

I would be more than happy to share our experiences providing this model to our customer and discuss if we may be able collaborate on this concept.

P.S. Great job, great product,
Thank you,

Osman Korkmaz