SO 1.5b First Impressions

[Shiva HN Shankar, modifié il y a 14 années.]

Hi

We are trying out the latest version of Social Office as a potential collaboration tool for a group of about 50 people. This is a fantastic product and we have had a great experience so far.

Here are a few things that we encountered:

1. Permissions to Add sites: By default all members can add new sites. Maybe there is a way to stop this. In an enterprise, it is desirable to have some control on site sprawl
2. Ability to leave a site or mark a site as inactive. Sites can have a finite lifetime. Once the purpose of a site is achieved, it might be desirable not to have the list show up in the My Sites menu. However, the ability to search through these "inactive sites" could be useful
3. Is NTLM SSO not working for SO? Manual Authentication works fine though against Active Directory
4. Ability for Admin to search in LDAP/AD and add users BEFORE they login would be very useful
5. RSS portlet configuration for enterprise proxy is not easy. In fact i havent been able to get it working at all
6. Ability to search documents through tags would be very useful
7. There is no way to add tasks from within a site?
8. The site branding is not very visible. I have had users who were confused whether they were in the My Home page or in some site's home page. Ability to add a custom image per site and making the site name more prominent could help
9. Ability to create groups and add groups to sites would make management more easy

On the whole, 1.5b has come a long way and is almost ready for roll-out in most situations in my view. Interestingly, we also evaluated Alfresco Share Community Edition 3.2 and the similarities are striking, with SO having a clear lead in the feature-set of the portlets while of course Alfresco maintains a clear lead in the document management area and the UI is more responsive. We are tilting towards SO as we near the end of our evaluation.

Great work.

[Shiva HN Shankar, modifié il y a 14 années.]

Ah and the ability to define templates for sites so that existing templates can be chosen in the Add Sites menu could also be useful. Imagine that you are working on Sales and have a particular set of folders in the doclib, few standard categories in the forums, typical tags, standard welcome message etc for each proposal. It could be quite handy to create a new site with these data pre-populated.

[Bryan Cheung, modifié il y a 14 années.]

Ah and the ability to define templates for sites so that existing templates can be chosen in the Add Sites menu could also be useful. Imagine that you are working on Sales and have a particular set of folders in the doclib, few standard categories in the forums, typical tags, standard welcome message etc for each proposal. It could be quite handy to create a new site with these data pre-populated.

We hadn't imagined this sort of thing but we are working on general site templates for customizing the set of pages that are created in the site.

[Bryan Cheung, modifié il y a 14 années.]

1. Permissions to Add sites: By default all members can add new sites. Maybe there is a way to stop this. In an enterprise, it is desirable to have some control on site sprawl

This could definitely be helpful, I just wonder what would be the best way to accomplish it UI-wise. Do we want to allow people to request permission to add sites, or do we want to require approval for a new site to be created (a Site Application of sorts)? But then if we do that will we hinder adoption of the product? Perhaps it could be solved by adding a "Merge Sites" feature.

2. Ability to leave a site or mark a site as inactive. Sites can have a finite lifetime. Once the purpose of a site is achieved, it might be desirable not to have the list show up in the My Sites menu. However, the ability to search through these "inactive sites" could be useful

So you're saying inactive sites are there for archival purposes? Also, currently you can leave a site but then you can't see its contents unless it's an open site.

3. Is NTLM SSO not working for SO? Manual Authentication works fine though against Active Directory

It should work. If not please file an issue on JIRA.

4. Ability for Admin to search in LDAP/AD and add users BEFORE they login would be very useful

Can you explain in more detail how this would work? Do you just need LDAP sync'ing users to SO? Have you poked around the Control Panel?

5. RSS portlet configuration for enterprise proxy is not easy. In fact i havent been able to get it working at all

Again perhaps you can add a JIRA issue with details on the problems you're having.

6. Ability to search documents through tags would be very useful

Please add a JIRA issue for this, I think it's solvable but might not be in until SO 2.0

7. There is no way to add tasks from within a site?

We didn't really imagine how to integrate tasks into the Sites. Can you list out examples of the kinds of tasks we might want to be able to add? Perhaps "Review this document" in Doc Library or "Review this Wiki page" etc.?

8. The site branding is not very visible. I have had users who were confused whether they were in the My Home page or in some site's home page. Ability to add a custom image per site and making the site name more prominent could help

Yes, I would agree on this point. Again, if you file an issue in JIRA as a feature request for 2.0, we'll consider it for the next release.

9. Ability to create groups and add groups to sites would make management more easy

What kinds of groups and what would they be able to do?

[Shiva HN Shankar, modifié il y a 14 années.]

Bryan Cheung:

1. Permissions to Add sites: By default all members can add new sites. Maybe there is a way to stop this. In an enterprise, it is desirable to have some control on site sprawl

This could definitely be helpful, I just wonder what would be the best way to accomplish it UI-wise. Do we want to allow people to request permission to add sites, or do we want to require approval for a new site to be created (a Site Application of sorts)? But then if we do that will we hinder adoption of the product? Perhaps it could be solved by adding a "Merge Sites" feature

I would think that a configuration parameter that could controls whether every one can create new sites or not could be a quick workaround. Of course this would then apply for the entire installation and wont be configurable per site.

2. Ability to leave a site or mark a site as inactive. Sites can have a finite lifetime. Once the purpose of a site is achieved, it might be desirable not to have the list show up in the My Sites menu. However, the ability to search through these "inactive sites" could be useful

So you're saying inactive sites are there for archival purposes? Also, currently you can leave a site but then you can't see its contents unless it's an open site.

Yes. A site could be marked as "Archived" and wont appear int he active sites list. But there could be an advanced search option to search through the archived sites also.

3. Is NTLM SSO not working for SO? Manual Authentication works fine though against Active Directory

It should work. If not please file an issue on JIRA.

Will test some more and open JIRA if required.

4. Ability for Admin to search in LDAP/AD and add users BEFORE they login would be very useful

Can you explain in more detail how this would work? Do you just need LDAP sync'ing users to SO? Have you poked around the Control Panel?

This is more of a scalability issue. I have configured SO for AD authentication but i am loathe to import the 20000 users. I was looking for a way to search for members directly in AD and add them to a site without importing them first. If i am not mistaken, this is how Alfresco's Passthru authentication works.

5. RSS portlet configuration for enterprise proxy is not easy. In fact i havent been able to get it working at all

Again perhaps you can add a JIRA issue with details on the problems you're having.

I have added the necessary properties in system-ext.properties and also added JVM flags but RSS is not working. Need to test more.

6. Ability to search documents through tags would be very useful

Please add a JIRA issue for this, I think it's solvable but might not be in until SO 2.0

Will do. Tags are not very useful without this feature IMHO.

7. There is no way to add tasks from within a site?

We didn't really imagine how to integrate tasks into the Sites. Can you list out examples of the kinds of tasks we might want to be able to add? Perhaps "Review this document" in Doc Library or "Review this Wiki page" etc.?

The other collaboration solutions that i have seen have a separate Tasks page, where you can add arbitrary tasks without any context. All members of the site can view the tasks and status. Of course having the ability to add tasks through a workflow from the Wiki, Document library portlets which get consolidated along with the arbitrary tasks would be a great feature.

8. The site branding is not very visible. I have had users who were confused whether they were in the My Home page or in some site's home page. Ability to add a custom image per site and making the site name more prominent could help

Yes, I would agree on this point. Again, if you file an issue in JIRA as a feature request for 2.0, we'll consider it for the next release.

OK

9. Ability to create groups and add groups to sites would make management more easy

What kinds of groups and what would they be able to do?

If you are working with groups of people, say Sales team, then it would be nice to add the entire sales team to a site, rather than add them one by one.

[Andrew Clements, modifié il y a 14 années.]

The very first impression I had of 1.5b was 'why is it so slow to login?'.

This was caused almost entirely by the weather portlet. The fact that this edition of Liferay is named 'Social Office' would seem to suggest that this edition will be frequently installed behind firewalls, proxies etc (as it was in my case). So many people will potentially have the first same impression that I had.

I would suggest that the initial weather portlet configuration (contains 90210, Frankfurt etc) be removed. In fact I'm not sure the weather portlet is a great idea for the home page at all given that the data source site is not easily configurable. I have currently disabled to weather portlet, and performance is pretty good.

The only other suggestion I would make (for tomcat) is a tweak to the memory options (eg -Xms512m -Xmx512m) to avoid the permgen errors.

So, first impression may have been a bit of 'what the ...', but second impressions are really good! Huge improvement over 1b. Great work.

[Andrew Clements, modifié il y a 14 années.]

BTW: Regarding the proxy configuration for RSS feeds, configuring system-ext.properties would appear to have little effect.

The proxy properties need to be added to the jvm command line:

eg: In Tomcat, you set JAVA_OPTS, in catalina.bat, catalina.sh and service.bat

catalina:
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.util.logging.config.file="%CATALINA_BASE%\conf\logging.properties" -Xms512m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -Dhttp.proxyHost=yourproxy.com -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080 -Dhttp.nonProxyHosts=localhost -Dhttp.proxySet=true

service.bat
"%EXECUTABLE%" //US//%SERVICE_NAME% ++JvmOptions "-Djava.io.tmpdir=%CATALINA_BASE%\temp;-Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager;-Djava.util.logging.config.file=%CATALINA_BASE%\conf\logging.properties" --JvmMs 512 --JvmMx 1024 --JvmOptions -Xms512m;-Xmx512m;-XX:MaxPermSize=128m;-Dhttp.proxyHost=yourproxy.com;-Dhttp.proxyPort=8080;-Dhttp.nonProxyHosts=localhost;-Dhttp.proxySet=true

Note: This config also contains a tweak to the memory (-Xms512m and -Xmx512m).