Liferay Social Office is an enterprise social collaboration solution for document sharing and team collaboration that streamlines communication, saves time, builds group cohesion and raises productivity. It offers team calendaring, blogs, forums, task management, and more. It can be integrated with Microsoft Office, and runs on a combination of MySQL and Tomcat.

Liferay positions the software as a budget alternative to Microsoft’s Sharepoint. Social Office supports SharePoint’s protocols, so that documents can be opened, saved, locked and edited in MS Office.

The various features offered by Liferay Social Office are outlined below:

Document Library: Liferay Social Office acts as a web-based shared drive. It is being used to centralize and organize all the files. Time-saving features are built in, including multiple file uploads and familiar desktop folders. File’s format can also be changed at the time of upload (i.e., .doc to .pdf).

Work from the Desktop: Liferay Social Office allows the user to work from desktop. It features integration with Microsoft Office, which means that when files and documents are uploaded from the local drive, they can be automatically uploaded to the Social Office online.

Team Calendar:This feature allows creating, managing, and searching for group events using the community-based calendar with task lists. Events can be shared across different departments, and event reminders can be set up to alert users of upcoming events by email, IM, or SMS.

Profile: Each user can fill out their own online resume-style profile that can help members discover expertise in the organization. Support project profiles, profile tagging, and personal information.

Wikis: Beyond document sharing, Social Office provides full-featured Wikis to facilitate communal information capture and gathering. Team members can easily start new wiki entries to build up a team’s personal online encyclopedia.

Blogs: This feature facilitates conveying information and conversations around blogs directly. Liferay’s Blogs provide the best features of modern blogging tools and allow keeping up with everyone’s thoughts and activities via dynamic RSS feeds to your email or a “Recent Blogs” display.

Activity Tracking: Activity tracking keeps tabs on personal and team activity and displays this information in various “Recent Activity” viewers for each specific tool, for all items tagged with a certain key word and on a Facebook-style Activity Wall.

Instant Messaging (Chat): Built-in Instant Messaging gives the access to all logged-in team mates. Chat boxes stay at the bottom of the screen as you navigate through Social Office and conversations remain secure behind the firewall.

Sites: Users can create sites which are separate and secured areas in Social Office that can be used for the various departments or teams within your organization. Each Site has its own set of collaboration tools (message boards, blogs), RSS feeds, shared document librarym, and a shared calendar showing the events for the day.

Contacts: This allows users to keep track of people both inside and outside the organization and automatically adds colleagues that share Site membership. Users can email an entire group of Site members all at once.

Related Content: Sites in Social Office automatically display related documents, forum threads, blogs, wiki entries, and users based on the tags found on the content currently being browsed.

Alfresco, a major player in the open source enterprise content management market has introduced Alfresco Migration Services to simplify content migration from costly legacy and proprietary solutions to Alfresco ECM.

This solution will enable organizations to decrease their ECM costs in an increasingly commoditized market.

Alfresco Migration Services will be made available for a variety of legacy and proprietary ECM solutions. The services will initially be offered for organizations seeking to migrate from EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint to Alfresco Enterprise.

The migration process is designed to handle all the content transfers, ensuring all content and critical metadata are transferred safely, including:

• Metadata Models (permissions, users, etc.)
• Content Transfers - on-demand or time-scheduled, on-premise or in the cloud
• Security & Authentication Models

Reasons for Migration: -

• Content Transformation - Word, XML, PDF and HTML
• Switching of vendors
• Flexible Search - full text, fielded, date range, soundex
• Version Control
• Fine Grained Permissions
• Workflow
• Introduction of new platform infrastructure
• Consolidation
• Acquisitions, mergers and demergers
• Processing of bulk content
• Popular development stack (Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, JBPM)
• Potential to scale horizontally
• Relatively inexpensive

Migration Challenges:-

• Specific business rules needs to be implicated to the migrated data.
• Data migration requires careful planning to perform well.
• The document needs to be migrated from different data sources.
• There should be common tool for each data source to reduce complexity and support expense.
• The time and management effort needs to be minimized to set up large migrations.
• Decrease time to migrate documents.
• Keeping a track on migration progress (including audit).
• Reduced effort is required for the recovery of failed migrations.

Migration Strategy:-

• Identify what needs to be migrated- Understanding of underlying structure
• Defining the structure of migrated content i.e. models, spaces and security needs
• Configure UI needs- Includes custom metadata fields and custom search parameters

Alfresco the open platform for social content management launches the Alfresco Community 4, the most significant release of the platform to date. Alfresco open source 4 highlights, a wealth of new user features and UI enhancements that enable faster user adoption, along with improved tools to allow developers to create social and cloud-scale, content-rich applications. They also separated their content indexing processes from content management and replaced this functionality with their own indexing solution. Alfresco Community 4 significantly increases overall system performance.

Alfresco 4 also includes functions to publish content and status updates to social sites, such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr and SlideShare which will be a welcome addition to users as the use of public social media rises. Other new features for cloud-scale performance, open platform for social channel publishing and user experience include:

High-performance Indexing: The New Alfresco Index Server that is based on Apache Solr extensively improves the performance by separating indexing from content processes.

Integrated workflow: It includes the automation of content-focused business processes with Activiti, which is the leading open source Java-based BPMN 2.0 business process server.

Enhanced clustering: This feature is being introduced to increase the reliability and scalability, including added support for clustered CIFS.

Simpler Process: Social content publishing, part of an enterprise content workflow, simplifies to much an extent the problem of multi-channel publishing. It also control publishing with existing review and approve workflows along with built-in content security.

Fewer Tools leads to lesser errors: This feature offers embedded social publishing into an organization’s core content and collaboration tool, which eliminates the need for social-specific tools and error-prone “copy-and-paste” to external tools.

Drag and Drop Simplicity: Drag and drop streamlines the movement of files around on HTML5 enabled browsers.

Additional support for audio, video, Adobe Creative Suite & Apple iWork documents: The support delivers inline preview and metadata extraction for more file types.

Social Features: The new added social features on Alfresco 4 enables to ‘Follow’ influential content creators as well as ‘liking’ the favorite content.

Cloud Collaboration: This includes Google Docs integration to collaborate in real time.

Mobile Support: The mobile support offers new, free iOS apps available from iTunes, along with continued support for WebDAV and CMIS standards for new mobile use cases.

Extensibility: For developers and partners, Alfresco web interface is now much easier to extend and customize.

Alfresco Community edition 4 is available for download from Alfresco’s website.

Steps to add search in theme:

1. Open file [LIFRAY_SDK]/themes/{theme-name}/docroot/_diffs/templates/portal_normal.vm

2. Add $theme.search() at your desired location.

3. Build and deploy the theme.

4. A search text box will appear where the code was placed

Steps to customize the search:

In case you need to customize the search functionality to search only specific content types, follow the steps below.

1. Open file [LIFERAY_HOME]/tomcat-6.0.26/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-ext.properties

2. Add following lines:

com.liferay.portlet.blogs.util.BlogsOpenSearchImpl=true

com.liferay.portlet.bookmarks.util.BookmarksOpenSearchImpl=true

com.liferay.portlet.calendar.util.CalendarOpenSearchImpl=true

com.liferay.portlet.directory.util.DirectoryOpenSearchImpl=true

com.liferay.portlet.documentlibrary.util.DLOpenSearchImpl=true

com.liferay.portlet.imagegallery.util.IGOpenSearchImpl=true

com.liferay.portlet.journal.util.JournalOpenSearchImpl=true

com.liferay.portlet.messageboards.util.MBOpenSearchImpl=true

com.liferay.portlet.wiki.util.WikiOpenSearchImpl=true

3. Change values to “false” for those you do not want to include in search result.

For example, to search only “Web Content”, leave “com.liferay.portlet.journal.util.JournalOpenSearchImpl” to “true” and make other values to false.

Enjoy the customized search in Liferay

We have tried to analyze the document management capabilities to be integrated in a Java web application. If you are using Liferay, it already has a document management portlet which has most of the basic capabilities. However Alfresco DMS is just great, but it requires integration effort if Liferay is necessary to be used as a front-end to support JSR168. Following are the points to give a must thought to using Alfresco.

1. Alfresco has very strong support for complex workflow

2. Rules in Alfresco can be created on folders for documents event or based on metadata type

3. Alfresco supports document versioning and document can be reverted to previous version

4. Liferay has no notification from document library updates

5. Liferay WebDAV functionality is broken

6. No discussion on documents in Liferay document library. Liferay does have comments facility to a document though.

7. Liferay Portal and its portlets use Lucene to provide full text searching capabilities. Liferay lucene indexing is not optimized and some of the case expected result is not returned.

8. Liferay document library is highly unstable and has lots of issues open on JIRA.

The above points are our initial analysis, so few changes or additions can be expected later as we analyze further.