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Mail Portlet and Contact

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Arnaud Dutartre, módosítva 11 év-val korábban

Mail Portlet and Contact

New Member Bejegyzés: 1 Csatlakozás dátuma: 2013.01.25. Legújabb bejegyzések
Hello,

I need to use a Mail Portlet in an application and this has to be linked also with contacts.
I have seen video about a Vaadin Mail Portlet but it is not maintained actually.

I have seen the Liferay default one, wich is minimalistic and not sure about the way to integrate a contact source.

So my question(s) is : Who has used the default Liferay Mail Portlet and what are the real feedbacks about it AND who had to integrate such a component and what was the choice, maybe an other app available somewhere ?

Regards
Arnaud
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David H Nebinger, módosítva 11 év-val korábban

RE: Mail Portlet and Contact

Liferay Legend Bejegyzések: 14914 Csatlakozás dátuma: 2006.09.02. Legújabb bejegyzések
Arnaud Dutartre:
I have seen video about a Vaadin Mail Portlet but it is not maintained actually.


Well, the Vaadin mail portlet didn't really need ongoing maintenance. It was created to demonstrate the power of Vaadin within Liferay. From a developer's standpoint, being able to see the difference in code/functionality between a JSP-based mail portlet (Liferay's) and a Vaadin-based portlet demonstrates why one might choose to develop portlets in Vaadin.

Who has used the default Liferay Mail Portlet and what are the real feedbacks about it AND who had to integrate such a component and what was the choice, maybe an other app available somewhere ?


Honestly I don't believe anyone would actually use this in a production scenario...

I mean, if you're using Liferay in an intranet environment, then the folks who would be using it have Outlook or something running to connect to your corporate mail server. This makes the mail portlet (either Liferay's or Vaadin's) look like a total piece of junk, but only because no one would ever really try to write a full outlook-like portlet to run in Liferay.

If you're using Liferay in a public internet environment, there are already tons of options for web-based email. Why would you want to also add the additional traffic so users could view their email within your Liferay environment rather than push them to some external existing web-email tool which they probably already have.

At the end of the day it always comes down to just not wanting to take on the traffic and load to allow users to view their email (either internally or externally) within Liferay.

Sending email is, of course, a different story. You may want to show a list of users (with email address hidden, of course) along with some form to collect an email body for allowing users to send email. This kind of thing happens all of the time, but never within the context of using the mail portlet.
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Davide Piazza, módosítva 11 év-val korábban

RE: Mail Portlet and Contact

New Member Bejegyzések: 20 Csatlakozás dátuma: 2012.08.14. Legújabb bejegyzések
There are at least a couple of reason I see for having a decent webmail portlet with contact management and addressbook support. And Liferay should not under estimate these to enhance adoption inside corporations.

1) one of the main problem when sponsoring an Intranet project across an Enterprise is adoption. Management (who is providing budget for the project) wants that everybody access it regularly, so that the informations inside are constantly shared across all the users. But you know users (well ... people) are definitely reluctant to change, and often intranet is seen just like another place to go to check for top-down communication flow. thus is hard to make employees understand that across the intranet are available valuable informations and document. "Forcing" them to constantly check email inside the Intranet would speed up the adoption process.

2) the second reason I envision is the integration between email (that - unfortunately - will never die) and other services provided inside the intranet, for example microblogging, CRM, Ticketing system, just to name a few... having a powerfull webmail beside these other tools would make a big difference.

These are requirements coming from the battle field (our customers) so I think (and hope) Liferay should listen here ....

Regards.
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David H Nebinger, módosítva 11 év-val korábban

RE: Mail Portlet and Contact

Liferay Legend Bejegyzések: 14914 Csatlakozás dátuma: 2006.09.02. Legújabb bejegyzések
Davide Piazza:
There are at least a couple of reason I see for having a decent webmail portlet with contact management and addressbook support. And Liferay should not under estimate these to enhance adoption inside corporations.


Note that I do not represent Liferay, my opinions are my own...

1) one of the main problem when sponsoring an Intranet project across an Enterprise is adoption.


Adoption is not forced by removing users local email clients. Adoption is usually a gradual process and garnered by users seeing obvious value in the tool. As long as you provide value in your Liferay install, adoption will happen.

2) the second reason I envision is the integration between email (that - unfortunately - will never die) and other services provided inside the intranet, for example microblogging, CRM, Ticketing system, just to name a few... having a powerfull webmail beside these other tools would make a big difference.


Integration is key to providing value. A one stop entry point for the enterprise services has obvious value. However, the integration points you've listed are not typically desktop-related tools, where email is one of those key elements that all enterprise desktops will have. If your users are all using web-based email within the enterprise (I've never run into one yet that does this), then your argument about liferay having a better mail portlet holds some water.

These are requirements coming from the battle field (our customers) so I think (and hope) Liferay should listen here ....


Liferay does listen, but I think you might be viewing Liferay as more than what it actually is... Liferay, for the most part, is a portal implementation. They provide the tools and framework for building and hosting your own portlets. The OOTB portlets are all functional, but they tend to be a) very generic and b) more or less examples of how you, as a portlet developer, could build out the portlets your enterprise needs. There's also c), that these OOTB portlets are meant to show off what the portal is capable of, more or less as demos and not production-level components (imagine trying to sell a portal w/o any generic portlets; you could start up the shell but you'd have no real way to demo what the portal is capable of w/o some portlets).

For example, Liferay.com runs on Liferay, but it is important to see that they use customized portlets that are not the OOTB ones. That pretty much demonstrates how they intend for you to use Liferay, too.

The new Marketplace concept kind of grew out of this. They do not want to focus their development effort on creating the best portlets that work in every environment - they focus on building the best portal (and that is what I think their focus should really be).

So the Marketplace allows developers or organizations to be the best portlet developers. Just like the various mobile app marketplaces, they are responsible for the core and do not have to build and maintain all of the various apps that individual mobile users might want or need.

Again, to emphasize, I am not speaking for Liferay, so don't hold my opinions against them. Some of my representations here are not completely accurate (for example, they're working on building great calendar functionality into the portal/portlets, so they do build portlets) and speak more to the general cases (i.e. they build the portal and you build the portlets).