Liferay Sync 3 Beta


My Documents View

New Liferay Sync UI

Liferay has released a beta of the new version of Liferay Sync, the popular document sharing add-on for Liferay. Download it from the Downloads page, read the official documentation, and see below for more details on this release!

Downloads

You can get Liferay Sync (server and clients) from the Downloads page. Note that for Liferay Portal 6.2 you will need to update your Liferay installation by installing the the beta 3 version of the Sync Connector Web plugin (sync-web) and (optionally) the Sync Admin plugin (sync-admin-portlet), and then update your desktop and/or mobile clients with the beta release.

What's New?

  • A completely revamped, modern and intuitive UI for both Mobile and Desktop.
  • Sync Desktop allows connections with multiple portal instances.
  • Administrators can decide which Sites can be sync'd and which cannot.
  • Administrators can pause / resume syncing, configure max connection counts, and more.
  • Smart differencing - Sync only sends and receives minimal differences when files are updated - not the whole file - no matter the file type..
  • For more details, and a free demo, don't miss tomorrow's Sync 3.0 Liferay LIVE Webinar with the Sync team.

Upgrading

If you are already using Liferay Sync and want to upgrade your environment to try out Sync 3 Beta, you first upgrade your server-side Sync Connector Web (sync-web) plugin by downloading the new beta version from the downloads page and dropping it into Liferay's hot deploy folder (see the Installing Plugins Manually section of the Plugin Management documentation for more details if you are not familiar with deploying plugins). Same for the Sync Admin (sync-admin-portlet) plugin, if you want to try that too. No data migration is necessary.

To update your clients, simply install the new versions to replace the old versions. You will need to re-configure your connection settings after installing the Beta (but your old settings won't be deleted in case you want to downgrade later).

This release is a Beta release, and you are encouraged to try it out and give feedback to Liferay. However, it is not a supported release and is therefore unsuitable for use in production environments!

Compatibility

See the downloads page for details, but basically:

  • Sync 3 (Desktop) requires Liferay Portal 6.2 with an updated Sync Connector Web (sync-web) plugin
  • Sync 3 for Mobile requires Liferay Portal 6.1+ (with no plugin required) or Liferay Portal 6.2+ with the updated Sync Connector Web (sync-web) plugin.

If you're on 6.2 you can also use the Sync Admin plugin (sync-admin-portlet) for additional server-side config options.

Documentation

The Liferay Documentation Team has been continuously adding and improving on the official documentation, based on customer and community feedback. Liferay Sync 3 Beta users can access the most recent Liferay Sync 3 Beta documentation updates on the Liferay Developer Network!
 

Known issues

There are a few differences between Mobile and Desktop that you should be aware of.
  • Liferay Sync Mobile can only connect to one Liferay instance (but does support multiple Sites within that instance). Liferay Sync Desktop can connect to multiple instances.
  • Liferay Sync Mobile will only download file contents on demand (when you select the files) to conserve network bandwidth and limited storage on most devices.

Bug Reporting and Feedback

Sync Mobile users will find a Send Feedback button on the app's configuration screen. Alternatively, for Sync Desktop and Mobile users, you can post a message in the Liferay Sync forum describing the issue along with any relevant screenshots, stack traces from log files, environmental descriptions, etc. it's also a good place to start discussions about features you desire in future releases and provide feedback in general.

What's Next

Of course we in the Liferay Community are interested in your take on the new features in Liferay Sync 3 Beta. Work has already begun on the next major release, based on user feedback and community ideas (e.g. SSO Compatibility, White Labelling). Find out more at tomorrow's free webinar.
 

Kudos!

This release was produced by Liferay's worldwide engineering team, and involved many hours of development, testing, writing documentation, translating, testing some more, and working with the wider Liferay community of customers, partners, and developers to incorporate all sorts of contributions, both big and small. We are glad you have chosen to use Liferay, and hope that it meets or exceeds your expectations! Webinar
Blogs
This is great news hopefully it is much more robust that earlier versions.
Can the software be used to aid in migration of documents between two Liferay systems? Standard lar file import seems to be hit or miss and no able to handle any reasonably sized file (eg 50MB is too large) so can we sync with a server and then connect to the new server pointing to the same folder on the PC, to upload the files to Liferay? Obviously this may only be a one off rather than constant synchronization.
Unfortunately, we added protection against pointing to existing sync folders. We wanted to prevent users from accidentally pointing to an old folder and pushing mass unintentional changes up to the server.

This can still be accomplished though with a few extra steps. After adding an account and it's sites for the second server, you can shut down Sync and move all the of the sites of the first account (below the account/root folder) to the new account's corresponding location. Provided that you have the same site names, all of the files should begin to sync when you start Sync back up.