Blogs

An overview of Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Intranets

• Install, set up, and build a corporate intranet with Liferay's complete guide
• Configure, customize, and integrate with other applications and also implement portals and plugins within Liferay
• Discussions, Wiki, blogs, collaboration, CMS & WCM, Social Office, federated search, clustering and more
• Clear, step-by-step instructions, practical examples, and straightforward explanation

Sample chapter, Table of contents, Download the code

Liferay Portal is the world's leading open-source portal platform built on Java and Web 2.0 technologies. Corporations use it to provide a unified web interface to data and tools scattered across many sources.

Liferay Portal uses the latest in Java, J2EE, and Web 2.0 technologies to deliver solutions for enterprises across both public and private sectors. Liferay Portal's flexibility allows it to be deployed in a number of different scenarios to meet key business needs. 

What this book covers

Chapter 1: Introducing Liferay for Your Intranet introduces Liferay portal, CMS and WCM, collaboration, social networking, and Social Office.

Chapter 2: Set up Home Page and Navigation Structure for the Intranet discusses how to implement a portal page with portlets. It also shows how to customize the look and feel of pages and portlets through themes and look and feel preferences. It helps us understand the portal, portlet container, and portlet according to the JSR-286 specification—how to set up the portal, including installation options and deployment matrix, how to configure the home page and all the other pages of the intranet website. Then it introduces us to building basic pages, as well as setting up the portal pages. It, going further, discusses how to navigate the structure of the intranet via portlets, for example, Site Map, Breadcrumb, and Navigation. It also shows how to configure the portal, how to customize the Dock bar menu, and how to configure database and mail. Finally, it provides guidance to bring pages together in action, to share any portlet within a portal page, and to customize the Control Panel.

Chapter 3: Bringing in Users first introduces how to create and manage organizations and locations and teams; how to add users and manage (for example,e.g. view, search, update, deactivate, restore, delete and impersonate) users; how to add user groups and manage (for example,e.g., view, search, update, delete and assign) user groups. Then it introduces how to integrate with different authentication servers: LDAP, LDAP, CAS, NTLM, OpenID, OpenSSO (renamed as OpenAM), SiteMinder. Furthermore, it introduces how to manage permissions, and how to add roles and manage (for example,e.g., view, search, update, delete and assign) roles.

Chapter 4: Forums, Categorization, and Asset Publishing describes how we can add categories and subcategories in Message Boards. Then it discusses how to add a tag and manage (add, delete, and update) categories and vocabulary, as well as how to tag assets and display tags. Finally, it addresses how to publish assets through the Asset Publisher portlet and how to configure and customize the Asset Publisher portlet.

Chapter 5: Wikis, Web Forms, and Polls introduces how to add and manage (view, update and delete) nodes of Wikis, to add pages at the nodes in Wikis, to manage (view, update, delete and search) pages for a give node in Wikis, to use permissions of Wikis portlet and permissions on nodes, and to publish Wiki articles in the intranet first. Then it introduces how to set up Web Form in order to collect users’ suggestions, to configure polls and to display survey in order to assess public opinions. In addition, it introduces how to integrate OpenOffice, Orbeon forms and Alloy UI forms briefly.

Chapter 6: Blogs, WYSIWYG Editors, and RSS  introduces how to add entries of Blogs; how to manage (e.g., view, update and delete) entries of Blogs; and how to add comments for a given entry of Blogs first. Then it discusses how to assign permissions on the Blogs portlet and entries of Blogs. It also introduces the ways to publish Blogs by Recent Bloggers portlet and Blogs Aggregator portlet and to build Blogs with the WYSIWG editor CKEditor. Finally, it discusses RSS and related portlets like RSS portlet, Weather portlet, Announcements portlet, and Alerts portlet.

Chapter 7: Roll Out to Other Teams introduces communities portlet, involved how to add a community; how to manage (edit, delete, search, join, leave) communities first. Then it discusses how to add and manage the pages, teams and users within a community; to assign permissions on communities, and to show what’s different between organization and community. How to employ community virtual hosting is also introduced. Furthermore, it discusses how to use stage, preview, and publish websites, and manage staging workflow. Scheduling and remote publishing are also addressed in details. Finally, it introduces how to use community tools, e.g., my communities, bookmarks, invitation, directory, etc.

Chapter 8:CMS and WCM introduces how to add folders and sub folders for images; to manage folders and sub folders; to add images in folders and manage images; to set up permission on folders and images first. Then it discusses how to add folders and sub folders for documents; to manage documents, to add comments, to give your rating, to view versions; to set up permission on folders and documents; and to publish documents. Moreover, it introduces structures management, templates management and articles management. It emphasizes on how to build articles based on structures and templates, and how to set up permissions on Web Content Management, articles, templates, structures, and Feeds. Finally, it introduces how to publish articles and to employ other WCM tools. In a word, WCM doesn’t only provide high availability to publish, manage, and maintain web contents and documents, but also does it separate contents from the layout.

Chapter 9: Social Office, Hooks, and Custom Fields introduces how to add a participant for chatting; to manage (view and delete) participants in chat portlet; to start chatting; and to set up chat portlet first. Then it discusses how to manage (check, delete, add, reply, forward, search) emails and furthermore, to set up mail portlet properly. It states how to manage SMS Text Messenger portlet and to send SMS text messages. Then it mainly discusses on how to build social office with so-theme, so-portlet together with hooks and other portlets. Finally it states how to apply custom fields on any assets.

Chapter 10: Search, WAP, CRM, Widgets, Reporting, and Auditing introduces how to employ federated search and how to integrate search against content from plugins first. Then it discusses how to use CSZ search and map search portlets. Especially, it discusses the OpenSearch concept. It also introduces Web Content search and how to configure sitemap and pluggable enterprise search. Finally, it discusses plugins management, WAP sites, reporting, auditing, CRM and Widgets.

Chapter 11: Ongoing Admin Tasks introduces system administration which provides ability to view sever information, to create and manage instances. Moreover, it discusses monitoring portal and portlets operations, dynamic data source (database read-writer), and database sharding. Then it introduces portal administration which doesn’t only allow users with permissions to manage users, organizations, user groups, and roles; but also does it show portal settings information, password policies, and monitors users’ activities. It also addresses how to build clustering environment, how to backup data and to migrate data, and how to speed up the portal. In addition, it discusses full integration with Alfresco by web services, RESTful services like OpenSearch, and moreover, CMIS. Furthermore, it introduces full integration of LDAP, SSO CAS, Liferay and Alfresco. Finally, it discusses Ad server OpenX integration.

Approach

This book is a practical guide with a very user-friendly approach. The author has taken a virtual enterprise as an example and has used the features of Liferay to build a corporate intranet for that enterprise.

Who this book is for

This book is for beginners to Liferay and "Do-It-Yourselfers" who want to develop a simple but powerful corporate Intranet. The book assumes technical confidence but does not require specialist administrator or developer skills.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank team members at Liferay, especially thanks to Raymond Auge, Brian Chan, Bryan Cheung, Jorge Ferrer, Michael Young, Jerry Niu, Ed Shin, Craig Kaneko, Brian Kim, Bruno Farache, Thiago Moreira, Amos Fong, Scott Lee, David Truong, Alexander Chow, Mika Koivisto, Julio Camarero, Douglas Wong, Ryan Park, Eric Min, John Langkusch, Marco Abamonga, Ryan Park, Eric Min, John Langkusch, Marco Abamonga, Michael Han, Samuel Kong, Nate Cavanaugh, Arcko Duan, Richard Sezov, Joshua Asbury, Shuyang Zhou of Liferay for providing the valuable information and all the support. Thanks to friends in Liferay community for providing comments and suggestions.

Appendix

In addition, two chapters, which are part of this book originally, are not included in this book due to count of pages:

• Chapter 9 Shared Calendars, WSRP, Business Rules and Workflow (56 pages)
• Chapter 11 Help Desk, e-Commerce, Social Networking and Knowledge Base (68 pages)

I will post these two chapters as blogs entiries or wiki pages shortly.