Social Office Wish List

[Shiva HN Shankar, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hi
I read from another post a suggestion by Bryan to start a Wish list thread, so here goes.
Issue or Task tracker
Even a simple, rudimentary form based tracker with email capabilities that comes out of the box. This will, IMHO nicely round off the collaboration capabilities of SO. And will finally convince my bosses to migrate from Sharepoint!

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

Shiva HN Shankar:

Hi
I read from another post a suggestion by Bryan to start a Wish list thread, so here goes.
Issue or Task tracker
Even a simple, rudimentary form based tracker with email capabilities that comes out of the box. This will, IMHO nicely round off the collaboration capabilities of SO. And will finally convince my bosses to migrate from Sharepoint!

Hi Shiva,

An Issue Tracker is a great idea. Do you mind spec-ing out some of the details of how you would expect it to function? Defining the business requirements would make it easier for us to implement something usable and useful.

[Ryan Terwedo, modificado hace 15 años.]

Well my long post somehow didnt, post so i will be concise this go around...

We would like to be able to see parts of the site in a SO turned off for certain users. For example, in our industry we are not allowed to let clients edit things such as a wiki, blog or forum. However the 5 employees doing certain things for that client would need to and should be able to edit these items. Almost even make the wiki private or something for a certain user group.

SO appears (other then chat) to just be a cleaner version of hte standard portal. We like liferay in that we can customize it as we see fit, but the UI for SO is much cleaner and we cannot yet figure out whether to implement in SO or standard version.

Id also like to see the ability to add pages, and portlets, which I assume would be coming just hasnt yet because this is BETA...

Ryan

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

Ryan Terwedo:

Well my long post somehow didnt, post so i will be concise this go around...

We would like to be able to see parts of the site in a SO turned off for certain users. For example, in our industry we are not allowed to let clients edit things such as a wiki, blog or forum. However the 5 employees doing certain things for that client would need to and should be able to edit these items. Almost even make the wiki private or something for a certain user group.

SO appears (other then chat) to just be a cleaner version of hte standard portal. We like liferay in that we can customize it as we see fit, but the UI for SO is much cleaner and we cannot yet figure out whether to implement in SO or standard version.

Id also like to see the ability to add pages, and portlets, which I assume would be coming just hasnt yet because this is BETA...

Ryan

Hi Ryan, how about mocking up a wireframe of a Site Wizard that would allow one to select which pages are included in a new site? This could include the option to add custom pages that contain widgets, custom portlets, or mashups. We can see what you come up with and put it to the community for improvements (and pray the design by committee approach doesn't do to the UI what it usually does to public art)

[Ryan Terwedo, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hi Ryan, how about mocking up a wireframe of a Site Wizard that would allow one to select which pages are included in a new site? This could include the option to add custom pages that contain widgets, custom portlets, or mashups. We can see what you come up with and put it to the community for improvements (and pray the design by committee approach doesn't do to the UI what it usually does to public art)

..I like that idea, a sort of community templete wizard. In which you can select what types of pages would be "installed" within the community. SugarCRM does something very similar to this, in that you can select what "tabs" are availible per user, role, etc. They even have a standard iframe tab (it doesnt log in like SO etc)

The way I picture it is, the admin can create templetes with XYZ pages in them, much like is done right now, except they can select which ones are there (even add ones you do not have) based on a users role etc.

I think the key to keeping the UI clean like SO is, is to have a wizard of sorts that just addes or deletes pages (that have the portlets "preinstalled" on them).

I would have something like a templete for:

Clients ( that in my case I would have to disable a wiki and blog for)
ABC user with extra pages
XYZ user etc etc

I am sad to say I have never made a wireframe, Im not that organized....pathetic really (altho my actual job does not require it) =)

[Fred Engelmann, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hi All,

SO certainly addresses a major end user adoption issue - it's clean and simple and easy to learn. Regarding the choice of pages / portlets within a given site, please take a look at how it's done in Alfresco Share. Each page has one function, and the site creator simply chooses from radio buttons to customize the site.

That may be too simple, but if that's the goal perhaps a similar approach would work in SO.

And thanks to the LR team for a year of outstanding progress (especially that Wiki, Jorge!)

(Update - thumbnail attached)

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hi Fred,

I think we'll definitely arrive at something that allows further customization. But the ability to remove pages once the site is added brings up an important issue in my mind—what happens to existing data (e.g., forums threads) if the forums page is removed? Does it get deleted or is it just not shown? And if you add it back, would the user expect to get the old data back?

If you just "hide" the page, it's not enough because content will still show up, say in the Activity Tracker or in an RSS feed that someone is subscribed to, etc.

[Ryan Terwedo, modificado hace 15 años.]

Bryan Cheung:

Hi Fred,

I think we'll definitely arrive at something that allows further customization. But the ability to remove pages once the site is added brings up an important issue in my mind—what happens to existing data (e.g., forums threads) if the forums page is removed? Does it get deleted or is it just not shown? And if you add it back, would the user expect to get the old data back?

If you just "hide" the page, it's not enough because content will still show up, say in the Activity Tracker or in an RSS feed that someone is subscribed to, etc.

Hi Bryan,

I see that as maybe a phase two item? Adding or removing later to me seems much more difficult (as to what happens with the data etc does it unsubscribe everyone etc) , then setting up a site in the first place with whatever pages on it.

I think that one thing that needs to be remembered however is that unless you are targeting a specific industry with XYZ regulations that you know of and are aware of and are experts in yourselves, there has to be some flexibility in it. Thats one of the great things about the standard install, however for cleanliness sake, the UI of SO looks so much better because things are automated.

A balence between automated and flexible needs to happen, to appeal to the broadest base of clients. I think this can be done with SO by adding flexibility (but only if the user chooses to do it). I would love the ability to make a few site templetes and then when adding them (as communities) in SO, pick which one to use. I also think that keeping the ablity to add a iframes page is great as many of our (and I assume others) webapps cannot or have not made the switch to open id and it gives us SSO capabilities.

...I forsee SO and the Standard install features "merging" down the road.. =)

[Shiva HN Shankar, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hi
Business Requirement
1. Delegate tasks to Site members and track them
2. Track team issues

Spec
I am afraid i can only share my experience with Sharepoint. In the Sharepoint world, this is a list with the most common fields being:

Form
1. Name of the task/issue (Text area)
2. Person to whom the task or issue is assigned to (lookup)
3. Status (Closed, Active, Abandoned etc)
4. Priority (Pull down: High, medium , low etc)
5. Category (Pull down. Customizable)
6. Start Date (Date picker)
7. End Date (Date picker)
8. Comments (Textarea)

Usage
1. The user enters the information in a form
2. Email is sent to the person to whom the task is assigned (optional)
3. Summary page should have display options to show tasks by status, person assigned to and due date
4. Clicking on the title should allow a user to see the task details or edit the task
5. Comments should be appended and display in reverse chronological order

In my view, lists are the most powerful feature of Sharepoint and would probably require heavy-lifting to get that functionality. However, a really simple Issue Tracker should do in most cases.

Hope this helps and thanks for SO.

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hi Shiva,

Thanks for the descriptions. Could you also put together some wireframes of the UI and a process flow diagram of how things like approval, notification, task creation, completion, etc. all fit together?

[Dmitry Babain, modificado hace 15 años.]

I don't get it. Liferay already has workflow through jbpm support. Even as basic as it is now, all of the previously mentioned issue-tracking features can be done with it. Do you want to get suggestions for improving Workflow portlet UI?

I think that as soon as the following
1. Fixing broken roles\communities support in workflow definition
2. Providing an ability to integrate workflow with Document Library for file storage
3. Providing an ability to integrate workflow with Message Boards for comments storage

will be done, the issue of issue tracking will be closed.

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

Shiva HN Shankar:

Hi
Even a simple, rudimentary form based tracker with email capabilities that comes out of the box. This will, IMHO nicely round off the collaboration capabilities of SO. And will finally convince my bosses to migrate from Sharepoint!

Hi Shiva, putting some requirements together, will try to get something up.

[Andre Sergej Calero Valdez, modificado hace 15 años.]

One thing I would really like to see, is a poll system like doodle. I don't know if you ever used doodle. But we're using it constantly to find agreement on meetingschedule. Having that included at social office would be a great benefit in my point of view.

http://www.doodle.com/main.html

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

Andre Sergej Calero Valdez:

One thing I would really like to see, is a poll system like doodle. I don't know if you ever used doodle. But we're using it constantly to find agreement on meetingschedule. Having that included at social office would be a great benefit in my point of view.

http://www.doodle.com/main.html

Hi Andre,

Perhaps we can just integrate it using the iGoogle integration. What do you think?

[André Calero Valdez, modificado hace 15 años.]

Sounds awesome.. But how do I do that?

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 15 años.]

We will have a mashup wizard in a future release that helps you add custom pages and iGoogle widgets.

[Jon Goldberg, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi,

After using social office for a while now some thought on things I would like.

A way to turn on or off different components like chat. Chat is cool but it uses a lot of bandwidth and the users don't use it much past the first couple of times as a kwel feature.

A way to add other other functions like other portlets like weather. It would be nice on the home page to be able to add additional portlets.

We really are loving Social Office and the only bugs we have seen are:

1. Adding blog entries from the blog page can cause it to freak out and auto save like 30 of the same post in progress. You have to add it from you profile instead.
2. Deleteing a Calendar entry there doesn't seem to be a way to do it.
3. Setting perminisions for a communities to be completely private. When you post forums if you don't remove read people not in the community can read them. It would be nice to have a something override that.

Just wanted to thank everyone working on Social Office and add my 2 cents.

Thanks,

Jon

[sundar al ram, modificado hace 14 años.]

HI Shiva,

Iam here for fill out my need for Liferay developers for pleasanton office,CA.
It would be fine if you can help me to find out the developers..

[Lisa Simpson, modificado hace 14 años.]

Sorry, but we don't want Google widgets. We prefer not to be data mined. What we'd like to see instead is something more like Lime Survey incorporated as default portlets. It can do small polls but its also capable of far more sophisticated survey creation.

[Mickey Fox, modificado hace 14 años.]

Because SO is what it is, I'd really like to see some client (as in customer) management portals added. I realize that Liferay "doesn't do customer management" but, if I am to integrate this system into the types of applications that I need, there simply must be some customer management tools - how else are people to discuss customer needs/wants while developing/planning projects, and costing the development appropriately, etc.?

BTW: Lisa has made a good point about Google's data-mining policies. I prefer to keep them away from my data.

Please pardon my typing - kitchen food prep accident....

[Lisa Simpson, modificado hace 14 años.]

For us, it's not a preference. It's an iron clad business requirement. We cannot and will not integrate with Google specifically because of the data mining.

[Hennie de Villiers, modificado hace 14 años.]

Social Office as a "portlet" to Full house Liferay would be ideal. I realise that there are motivation why some Liferay functionality are switched off in Social Office, but this means loosing out on some aspects.

this could potentially be achieve to have an common systems group "Social Office Users" which could be switched on and off as may be required.

Secondly the installation of both Liferay and Social Office can be a bit cumbersome to the not so technical inclined user, whilst the real beneficiaries and typical business managers etc. When it comes to hosting environments, most service providers does not allow applications such as this in a virtual hosted environment. The first entry barrier becomes a dedicated server, then techi know how to install and only then can one start to expereiment with the actual functionality.

An Amazon AMI running Sun solution including openSolaris 2009.06, Glassfish and WEBstack with both Liferay and Social Office will very likely rocket adoption as it completely lowers entry barriers to experiment and relatively low cost.

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi Hennie,

We are definitely honing our virtual / cloud / hosting strategy. Perhaps we can ping you for your thoughts on this at the appropriate time.

[Hennie de Villiers, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi Bryan

You are more than welcome. Liferary will probably from a core component of our future offerings, so we are keen to become more involved.

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 14 años.]

Mickey,

Can you shed more light on what these capabilities would look like? Do you have wireframes or business requirements?

[Mickey Fox, modificado hace 14 años.]

While not specifically related to SO (includes Portal), it would be incredibly handy to be able to edit portal properties via the GUI and not just text file. It would be INCREDIBLY handy to be able to restart SO from the GUI after having made modifications...

[Bryan Cheung, modificado hace 14 años.]

Mickey,

Yes, I fully agree with you on this in principle. It's been a longstanding item on the wishlist.