Social Networking for Enterprises

Liferay Social Office brings the power of several social networking tools like blog, wiki, forum etc at one place with an option to create multiple sites on a single portal. We tried out its public Beta

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

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Social networking tools are slowly making their way into enterprises. Many organizations now a days have internal blogs and department specific wikis which contain information about their procedures, policies, documentation etc. This is a good thing to have only for short term. In the long run, you will have the challenge of managing multiple wikis and blogs. Liferay Social Office provides social networking tools at one place and saves the time as well as resources used in multiple installations of various social tools within an enterprise.

It allows users to create separate and unique sites inside Social Office which can act like a community, or a separate site for a particular department inside an enterprise. Each site has its own set of collaboration tools along with shared document library and calender. Sites can be created in a few clicks and configured to ensure that only legitimate members have access to them. It also provides Instant Messaging capabilities for the members of a particular site. Members can also configure Social Office to act as their default email client.

Social Office has a document library which allows users to share documents at a central place. It also supports integration with MS Office i.e, if you modify any file or document from your local machine, updated version will automatically be uploaded to Social Office. Just like most social tools, this also has an activity tracking feature for wiki, blogs, messageboards as well as a document library.

How to use ?
Liferay Social Office is currently in its Beta version, and can be freely downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/58htz2. Installing it is simple. Once installed, you can start it from program menu. Social Office launches on your default browser, and asks you to provide login credentials. Default administrator credential is 'admin' for both username and password. You can create a new id forSocial Office from the front page itself. As a new user registers , it automatically generates a password and sends it to his email.

Once you login as an administrator, you first need to to create a site. To do this, click on 'Add Site', provide name and description for it and click on 'Save'. The new site will be visible under 'My Sites'. Just click on the name to enter the homepage of the site. From here, you can set up a blog or wiki or even a forum in a few clicks. To create a wiki, click on 'Wiki' at the top of homepage. Here you can start a new wiki by editing its front page and adding child pages. You can also have multiple wikis. For this, go to 'Manage Wiki' and click on 'Add Wiki' . Similarly you can start forums, create categories in it and start posting. On the calendar page, you can add events, appointments, meetings related to that particular community , which will be visible to every member of the community. Only the admin can add events to the calender, and users can modify events added in the calendar based on the permissions.

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