I have only recently started using Liferay 6.0. I have downloaded liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0.4_1 community edition.
First of all can you please recommend me some website and books or articles for Liferay 6.0? (The ones available on the Internet are for earlier versions...)
Secondly. I don' t seem to get the structure of Liferay. For example, how do organisation, communities, users, pages all fit in together?
Lastly, could you tell me how I could make a link on a page to point to a directory on the file system at the local machine of the user?
Thanks.
To work through Liferay internals is really tough but it's not impossible. There's no main source of documentation and people has to google around and forget things very easily without possibility to get back to the original source...
Organizations can form hierarchies as real organizations would.
Communities has similar role as organizations but from a different point of view.
The main difference consists in :
persistence - persists in time in
contrast to communities which appears
and disappears
administration - users “belong”
to an organization which means that
the the admin of an organization is
able to edit his profile. On the other
hand users “join” a community which
means that the community admin can
only manage the membership.
Relationship - organizations can
form a hierarchy while communities are
independent of each other
membership - users “must” belong
to an organization while joining a
community is optional
User groups - Unlike organizations and locations, user groups have no context associated with them. They are purely a convenience grouping that aids administrators in assigning permissions and roles to a group of users instead of individual users or assigning a group of users to a community.
Roles define permissions across the portal, an organization or across a community. There are functions like creation of a thread in a discussion forum. Problem is that there are forums across scopes like community, organization or the entire portal. So that portal role grants access to creation of a new thread in each and every discussion forum and community role just within a particular community.
I'm also a Liferay newbie but here's the general structure of Liferay in case someone is interested.
Organizations are a portal administrator mandated hierarchy. Organizations may have sub organizations that are administered by organization administrators in each organization. Each organization can have it's own pages.
Communities are like organizations but can't have sub communities and non-administrator users may be allowed to create them. Each community can have it's own pages.
Users are registered users who may have their own pages and may belong to any number of organizations and/or communities.
Pages are web pages that users with certain permissions can edit simply by selecting a predefined layout and adding/removing portlets and sub-pages.
Portlet is a web application that usually "runs" as part of a page in it's own window like container.
can you please recommend me some website and books or articles for Liferay 6.0?
Our liferay tag is a good place to start with. It contains all the relevant information about some useful websites and also some good books suggestion. And it is continually being updated.
I don' t seem to get the structure of Liferay. For example, how do organisation, communities, users, pages all fit in together?
Unlike for previous versions, the user-guide is really a good place to know some basic administration concepts like these.
could you tell me how I could make a link on a page to point to a directory on the file system at the local machine of the user?
I don't know exactly what you want or what is the requirement to do this, but giving <input type="file" /> would open the file browser to select a file or else you can use flash to achieve this or construct a link like Click to pen local folder - but this only works for windows and it opens the folder structure inside the browser itself and with IE it opens the Windows explorer.
Now, you can access Liferay documentation to learn more about liferay. Starting from v6.1 there are no communities. Now it has organizations and sites.
As far as I know, currently there is only one book for Liferay 6, from Jonas Yuan:
http://www.liferay.com/web/jonas.yuan/blog/-/blogs/liferay-book:-liferay-portal-6-enterprise-intranets
Related
Now our team is facing new project - creation of new company's intranet portal. Because of some reasons we are considering java open source portals and deciding between Liferay and GateIn.
One of very important requirements is following: portal representation for users must depend on country/language settings of customer computer, it means not only portlets localization but users in US subsidiaries of the company should see probably other structure than users in France.
Is it possible to implement the requirement in Liferay and GateIn?.
This can definitely be achieved through Liferay. Please have a look at the concepts of creating organisations.
Am not sure if this can be done in GateIn. However, there are many other things that you may need to keep in mind before choosing these Portals. I have tried to mention few of them here.
1. Check the stability of the Portal server that you will choose to run on a particular Container. GateIn initially was unstable.
2. You may have to override few files (for your customization) if required. GateIn uses GTMPL view technology for the same. Check how good are you in this. In this case, Liferay is easier (Liferay doesn't use any GTMPL UI framework)
3. Apart from developing a location based Portal, if you are also trying to achieve other things like fully Ajax based pages, a good UI framework (like JSF) etc then check if the Portal server you are choosing runs on a particular Container which supports Ajax, JSF (latest versions)
Above were few and list may grow. But, to conclude I would suggest to go for Liferay :)
This can be achieved with Gatein at different level :
Sites : you can declare multiple sites running on the same portal instance(sharing same User Base). In this case you can automatically redirect user to different country sites, based on the country/language of the user.
Sites Navigations : Gatein provides portal, group and user navigations. Navigation is created dynamically when a user connects to the portal. You can have only websites, navigation will created dynamically by user (based on group and user permissions).
Pages (Dynamics layout rendering): GateIn renders each page dynamically. A page is composed of multiple containers that contains portlets or gadgets.
By setting permissions on each container and by using User Group or Membership of the connected user, it's possible to have different page layout.
Of course, you can also mixed these 3 approaches to build your portal.
Liferay is very buggy, and community is very bad. Unless you pay the support.
GateIn promises much, but still lacks functionality.
You may consider JBoss Juzu and Apache Struts to develop generic portlets in order to void any portal vendor lock-in.
Struts provides features of internationalization, localization, timezones achieve my project.
I make use of struts2-portlet plugin to achieve a reporting portlet running on multiple portals. Here is my sample: code.google.com/p/jasperrocks/wiki/Features
I am trying to set up dynamics for a call centre that just wants to do cas management. How do I turn off these things off so there is no evidence of them for a user of the system?
A good place to start would be to edit the SiteMap.
There is a project on codeplex which might be helpful, otherwise you can find good guides dotted around the place:
Editing the SiteMap
Editing the SiteMap 2
With this you could hide Sales & Marketing, which would be a good start. You may also want to look at amending permissions for Leads/Opportunities which can be done by editing security roles. This will help nosey/inquisitive users from creating records if they find links elsewhere.
I presume that you are referring to the subsections of the native CRM navigation structure which shows Workplace, Sales, Marketing, Service and Settings.
Visibility of these areas can be driven in two different ways. You may choose to employ both methods.
Firstly record-type visibility is governed by a user's permissions. Remove a users read access to Invoices for example and it will cease to appear as a navigable option in their UI. Similarly the sub-areas that I previously mentioned will cease to appear if a user has no access to any of the record types that it contains.
consequently it may be possible to achieve some of your aims by giving users the least possible permissions required to do their job (though you should be doing this anyway really) by granting the correct ouot-of-the-box roles or cloning and customising one of those roles. The problem is that the Sales section , for example, contains record types that your users will need to see, e.g. contacts. you won't be able to revoke access to contacts so you'll likely need technique #2 as well:
The CRM sitemap can be customized to contain whatever you want and can even contain new areas. One feature available is to alter or create rules that show/hide areas based on record permissions. I'd recommend downloading the Visual SiteMap Editor and read this part of the CRM SDK
We're planning to use Sharepoint 2010 as a CMS for a website we're building. This site will also have login functionality; and my boss suggested we use Sharepoint's user profile features to store user info (username, password, contact info, etc.) for the site. How is this better then say using a standard list or a database table somewhere? I'm looking into how this could possibly work; but has anyone here tried something similar? Any anecdotes about it you could share? Any constructive input is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Frank
You asked for anecdotes. I have an anecdote.
A while back, I was trying to set up a Sharepoint server that exposed users' personal pages to the Internet at large. We wanted to allow authenticated access, but not to require it; that is to say, normal users would have read-only access and additionally the ability to submit InfoPath form data to Sharepoint libraries created to receive the results. The users could thus post public information and create public surveys using Infopath web forms.
When I went to make access public, I ran into a few problems. The "unauthenticated users" option on the preferences page of the document library was greyed out, even when I was logged in with a super-admin account.
In the end, I had to do a little bit of URL hacking to make this work. I had to change "DOC" to "DOCLIST" in the URL I used to access the preferences page (not that exactly, but something like that) and then the "everyone" option became available. In other words, there was actually no official way to do what I was trying to do.
The whole thing left a really sour taste in my mouth about Sharepoint for Internet-facing sites. See also things like this. Sharepoint is really designed for Intranet use only. As an additional downside, it is much more resource-hungry than normal CMSen. A full Sharepoint install can, without a single user, choke a pretty powerful virtual machine. I can't comment on its scalability as I've never done a really large rollout, but I can say that the indexing service is pretty heavy on the CPU.
Seems to me that LDAP would be a better way to store information on users; if you're using Sharepoint, you've probably already got an AD infrastructure. AD stores user profile info in LDAP anyhow - what you see in "Active Directory Users and Computers" is just a glorified LDAP browser.
Here is my initial toughts:
PRO: It's "easy" to merge infomation from outer sources like your AD, to be stored with the "other" user information in order to be displayed using the same means.
CON: I haven't come across a FBA Membership provider for User Profile Store.
I have modified my MOSS 2007 configuration to query a given target AD successfully. I would like to show some custom LDAP fields (such as country) in the PeopleEditor control and allow users to search against these fields. Can someone point me towards useful resources/tutorials showing how to do this?
Thanks, MagicAndi.
You need to inherit from the EntityEditor control (just as PeopleEditor does) and write your own queries and validation.
Some background (read community content):
EntityEditorWithPicker
PickerDialog
SimpleQueryControl
Along with these links and carefully studying the PeopleEditor control with Reflector, another good resource is this blog post from Igor Kozlov. There's a less detailed but still useful example on MSDN here.
I'm working on a CodePlex project that queries any given Active Directory from a people picker. It's well documented and combines techniques from the various references out on the web (giving credit of course). Hope it helps someone as well!
A first step should be to map the fields form the AD to a attribute in the SharePoint user profile. You can do this in the configuration of the Share Service Provider (Central Administration > Shared Services > User Profiles and Properties).
There you add a new attribute and define which AD field should be mapped to it. You can also define which fields the users are allowed to override (but only in SharePoint, it's only a one ways synchronization) and which one are read only.
This blog post shows how to configure the SharePoint search to be able to search users by a custom attribute in the user profile.
I hope this will point you into the right direction.
We are researching the various options that exist in our environment to create an Employee Directory. We have a SharePoint portal, AD and recently moved from Lotus Notes to Exchange. Our current employee search is a custom Notes DB that has since been retired.
Since moving to SharePoint an year ago, we've used a custom list using SharePoint Profiles that are updated from AD. But the simple list interface isn't very user friendly and is very slow. Sone of the requirements include type-ahead, pictures, and details of skills/certifications and other demographic information etc. We are considering building an ASP.NET or SilverLight application that can consume the information in the SharePoint list. With the introduction of Outlook and the Global Address List, we are now wondering if it might be easier to build something within Outlook.
Has anybody traveled a similar path and what would you advice us to do?
Microsoft has a huge set of offerings for Collaboration and Social Computing in Sharepoint.
See this document, pages 8 and 9 for information about features related to an employee directory, including details of skills/certifications and other demographic information.
A la carte availability of individual features (such as People Profiles and People Search) and pricing may be an issue, but you may want to look into buying something rather than building it (if you can get the pieces you want for a price you can afford).
Sharepoint can connect with Outlook to keep the lists synchronized if you want to use outlook. And there are definitely a lot of different ways to change the way the lists are presented in the Sharepoint portal to make them more user-friendly. Having those details on the portal will certainly be a boon when combined with the powerful search and indexing features in SharePoint so you can identify employees based on their profile details easily.
We use the people search for this pretty effectively. We populate data in AD, then connect profile properties to AD attributes. That's only if you have MOSS, though. If you're working with WSS, you'll have to build something more custom.
One gotcha, though, is that the People Search out of the box doesn't easily do partial searches (i.e. searching for "john" doesn't match "johnson"). That's a big downer in my mind. You can use Ramon Scott's approach of a Content Editor Webpart with a form and some Javascript to work around it, and you can also get there via the advanced search box (albeit indirectly), but it sure would be nice if it were easy to make the default search box do partial name searches.
I recently just discoverd a somewhat easy visual basic script that draws information from the active directory where you can specify which OU to draw from where it displays all user information in a simple .HTM page. it includes a search bar, recognizes patterns (address) (company telephone number) etc... If you would like i can post it for you. you only need to fill in a few sections (display name for directory, OU, OU display, and tags) and you can always change the way things look too.
This should be taken care of by using the My Site feature that's available within SharePoint. You will then be able to search SharePoint users by skills, certifications, projects, and educational qualification.
Please refer to the SharePoint Planning and Deployment material on TechNet for more info.
SH.