Invite Member by Email

[Anonym, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

We are using SO for Pilot set of users. I want to know more about Invite members by email. For example, I have a site, I want to invite someone with his hotmail/gmail/yahoo id who is not created in liferay. After clicking on Send Invitation, it sends the email to user. User get the email and click on the embeded link, he is forwarded to a login page. He can not login without the user name and password.

So what happens when you click Send invitation to an external user
- Does it create a user in liferay? I check in the control panel, I could not find
- How can that user login

We had similar functionality in Alfreso Share, where you can invite a user with First Name, Last Name and email address. Alfresco creates a user and user gets user name and password and is able to login.

Please share your idea, if it is a bug, let us know, how it can be fixed.

[Bryan Cheung, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Hi,

The idea was that the user would be made aware of the availability of the Social Office application, then the user could use the new account functionality to create their own account.

The risk with the approach you outlined is that many "dead" accounts might be created if the user never responds. For example, someone might be invited to a personal email address, but then decide that they want to use their corporate email address, so they might ask the inviter to send another invitation to a different email address.

What do you think? Or perhaps the invitation email should point them directly to an account creation page?

[Ravinder Singh, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Bryan,
I like your approach, send an email to user, in the email user gets account creation link with the prepopulated email id. User creates the account and logs in. This will help us to expose the create account functionality ONLY to the invited users.

My question are following
- How to change the email template
- If one user has invited an external user, and now let us say external user create the account, do I need to send the invitation again or the previous invitation will be valid because user will login with screen name and not with email address.

Please confirm

[Ravinder Singh, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Any update. I need to let my users know ASAP.

[Bryan Cheung, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Hi Ravinder,

On this question:

- If one user has invited an external user, and now let us say external user create the account, do I need to send the invitation again or the previous invitation will be valid because user will login with screen name and not with email address.

I'm not quite sure what you mean in the second part. So, let's say Ravinder invites John Smith to Social Office. John Smith creates an account and logs in. At that point John Smith should be able to login just fine. I'm not sure what you mean by "do I need to send the invitation again or the previous invitation will be valid because user will login with screen name and not with email address."

Finally, please see my private email to you as we shouldn't use these public forums to provide a formal support SLA to you.

Best,
Bryan

[Ravinder Singh, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

thank you Bryan for immediate response. I have sent a private email to you

[Ryan Park, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Ravinder Singh:

- If one user has invited an external user, and now let us say external user create the account, do I need to send the invitation again or the previous invitation will be valid because user will login with screen name and not with email address.

Hi Ravinder,

No you do not have to re invite the user as long as the user has created the account as soon as he access the page with the url given in the email.

In social office, instead of create a new user for every invite, a unique key is generated for single use and that key is stored as soon as the user arrives on your social office instance. As long as the user did not navigate away from social office prior to creating her\his account they should have the invitation once they have created their account.

Also, should the user navigate away from the page and then create the account. All they would need to do is simply click on that link provided by the email. Logging in will bind that unique key to their account so that they may use that invitation with their account.

Likewise, say that a user already has an account but you have invited them by email. Clicking on that link and logging in will similarly bind that unique key to their account so that they may use that invitation with their existing account.

Hope that answers your question!


--Edit:
Just another tidbit, once a key has been associated with a user no other user may use that key to accept the invitation.

[Hennie de Villiers, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Hi Bryan

I agree with the dead account issues, but at the same time it would be nice to be able to toggle such feature on or off, maybe on the go as you populate email invitations to a specific community, group or organisation. A check box "create user" behind the email address may do.

This feature could be used to force conformity. In some cases one may want to force users to use their company emails oppose to leave them the choice to use their private, gmail or other accounts. It will also save time as it is a bit of a long winded process to first invite a user, then let them create their own accounts, then find the accounts and only then set roles and permissions as in the case of using Portal.

By example:
Organisation ABC collaborate with other external organisations (not part of the portal) on project XYZ.
When creating a community for project XYZ, new user accounts are auto created at the time of sending the invitation with autoset roles and permission to XYZ. If the user already exists, then it should automatically extend permissions to include access to XYZ.

Is there a better way to administrate this process using Portal, in a similar way as to how SO manages it?

[Hennie de Villiers, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Disconnect between invite sent to new user using "Invite by Email" and the new users actual experience when signing in.

I noticed the following using the cignex demo SO instance, when inviting a user to join a new site using the "Invite by Email" option:

The user receives an email with something like:
Jonas has invited you to join "Mumbo Jumbo" on Social Office.
Follow the link below to confirm or ignore this invitation:
http://liferay.cignex.com:9090http://liferay.cignex.com:9090/web/guest/login?key=503620fa-1608-4e4b-b9ce-7abcd28d4c8c

Irrespective if the user already exists or need to register as a new user, the following occurs:

1. The user does not get an invite from "Jonas" to accept and add the site to his/her sites once he/she sign in.
2. If the site is private, there is not way the user will ever get to it. If it is public at least the user can at least choose to join "Mumbo Jumbo", that is if the user knows where to look.
3. The communication process thus have a "missing link" and is incomplete and does not present a good user experience as the new user, not knowing SO, will first have to fiddle around before finding the site he/she was actually invited to.

Another related issue that can be streamlined is as follows:

If [e-mail] is invited using the "Invite by Email" option and [e-mail] already exist as a user "meUser" (userName); then [e-mail] will receive the email notification. However if "meUser" then logs in there is no invite to accept the invitation to join the site. This is a problem if the site is private as "meUser" will not be able to access it unless invited again.

It would be better if SO recognise [e-mail] as an existing user when entering [e-mail] under "Invite by Email". The suggestion is that "meUser" is then list under "Members to Invite" and not "Invite by Email" users. This way the process flows smoothly.

It would also be vary handy to have a dialogue box to add more content to the default email invite.
Even better would be if the invite could be tagged as an action to follow-up on.
This will give the person inviting the other a way to track if the invitee responded to the invitation or not.

[Vinod V, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Hennie de Villiers:

The user receives an email with something like:
Jonas has invited you to join "Mumbo Jumbo" on Social Office.
Follow the link below to confirm or ignore this invitation:
http://liferay.cignex.com:9090http://liferay.cignex.com:9090/web/guest/login?key=503620fa-1608-4e4b-b9ce-7abcd28d4c8c

Irrespective if the user already exists or need to register as a new user, the following occurs:

1. The user does not get an invite from "Jonas" to accept and add the site to his/her sites once he/she sign in.
2. If the site is private, there is not way the user will ever get to it. If it is public at least the user can at least choose to join "Mumbo Jumbo", that is if the user knows where to look.
3. The communication process thus have a "missing link" and is incomplete and does not present a good user experience as the new user, not knowing SO, will first have to fiddle around before finding the site he/she was actually invited to.

Another related issue that can be streamlined is as follows:

If [e-mail] is invited using the "Invite by Email" option and [e-mail] already exist as a user "meUser" (userName); then [e-mail] will receive the email notification. However if "meUser" then logs in there is no invite to accept the invitation to join the site. This is a problem if the site is private as "meUser" will not be able to access it unless invited again.

We face exactly the same problem. It looks like the invite by username feature is pretty much ineffective.

We even get the wrong url issue like that pointed out in this post:
http://liferay.cignex.com:9090http://liferay.cignex.com:9090/web/guest/login?key=503620fa-1608-4e4b-b9ce-7abcd28d4c8c
ie, we get the virtual host name 2 times in the URL.

Is there any way this could be corrected..?

[Ryan Park, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Hi Vinod,

We've since fixed the issue where the url seems to be written twice. See, SOS-256 for the issue ticket.

The first part I'm not so clear on. I invite a user my his\her account, and I can log in as that user and find the invitation, via email or not.

If you mean invite by email, In my short tests I still am able to create an account, sign in, and find the invitation. Perhaps this has been fixed since the 1.5b build but I am unable to find the associated ticket.

In any case, I will put this in my todo list to test it more throughly and fix it if necessary.

Thanks for your feedback,
-Ryan

[Vinod V, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Ryan Park:

Hi Vinod,

We've since fixed the issue where the url seems to be written twice. See, SOS-256 for the issue ticket.

The first part I'm not so clear on. I invite a user my his\her account, and I can log in as that user and find the invitation, via email or not.

If you mean invite by email, In my short tests I still am able to create an account, sign in, and find the invitation. Perhaps this has been fixed since the 1.5b build but I am unable to find the associated ticket.

In any case, I will put this in my todo list to test it more throughly and fix it if necessary.

Thanks for your feedback,
-Ryan

Thanks Ryan!
But I am not sure how to upgrade my 1.5b installation to 1.5RC version (The JIRA says that the invite link is fixed in the RC version). :|

Now, regarding the invite by email, I actually don't get the purpose of the URL in the mail. What does that link do? Clicking on it doesn't seem to confirm the invitation; a simple link to the home URL would do just the same task.

Also, if I click on any SO url (invitation link or any other link) and if I am not logged in, it takes me to the login screen; and when I log in, it will go to my home page and not directly to the 'link'ed page...

[Hennie de Villiers, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Hi Rayn

Could you maybe confirm if this fix is included in the current download or 1.5B as per sourceforge.net?

If not where can I find the relevant download?

I also note that some one referred to the 1.5RC version. Is this available for download somewhere?

[Vinod V, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

Hi Ryan,

Could you confirm how I could fix this issue in an already existing 1.5b installation?

[Marc Piparo, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

Having the same issue. Is there anyway to get a patch for this?

thanks.

[Jairo Luna, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Do you have any update of this?

Thank You!

[Markus Puljula, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Hello,

This was not fixed in the 1.5b zip package available at SourceForge.

I was able to fix it by stabbing the source code. I do not have a deep understanding (yet :] ) in the internals of Liferay so I am not sure if my fix was the best solution.

File: ../so-portlet/WEB-INF/src/com/liferay/so/service/impl/MemberRequestLocalServiceImpl.java
Method: protected String getMemberRequestURL
Add an IF-statement to check if PortalUtil.getLayoutFriendlyURL(layout, themeDisplay) starts with PortalUtil.getPortalURL(themeDisplay). If it's true then just add return statement return PortalUtil.getLayoutFriendlyURL(layout, themeDisplay) + "?key=" + key;.

This only happens if you set your virtual host to something other than "localhost" I think. For example if you access LRSO 1.5b through http://localhost... then PortalUtil.getLayoutFriendlyURL(layout, themeDisplay) returns the correct URL "/web/guest/login". If you access LRSO 1.5b through say www.yourwebsitename.com that you have configured as a virtual host then PortalUtil.getLayoutFriendlyURL(layout, themeDisplay) returns the url with the domain name AND friendly URL which is incorrect.

I am not sure what is causing this. Perhaps something to do with servlet mappings, virtual host mappings, filters or tomcat settings.

--

Markus Puljula.

[Tarun S. Kayasth, geändert vor 14 Jahren.]

Hi,

Yes in liferay it just sends the invitation to the user via Email.

It do not create that user in liferay. you have to create user for that or user has to go to create user form and get login credentials.


Thanks,
Tarun Kayasth