Now Available: Social Office to Liferay 7 Upgrade

Jamie Sammons
Jamie Sammons
2 Minute Read

I am pleased to announce the Social Office to Liferay 7 upgrade has been released!

Update 06/16/2017: For anyone interested in the tasks application, I have converted it to Liferay 7 modules.  Although completely unsupported, it seems to be working okay so far.  You can find the repo here.

Introduction

Liferay Social Office was previously an add-on for Liferay Portal CE 6.2 and earlier.  With the release of Liferay 7, most of these components have been added to Liferay Portal CE and Social Office has been removed from Marketplace.  This means that Social Office no longer requires a separate installation, upgrade and support.

Most of the Social Office to Liferay Portal CE 7.0 upgrade process is completed by the standard Liferay upgrade procedure. There are additional steps that need to be completed after the standard upgrade process is finished in order for Social Office to work with Liferay Portal CE 7.0.

Upgrade Overview

Social Office to Liferay 7 Upgrade - We have provided a series of components, an upgrade tool and upgrade instructions that will aid in upgrading Liferay Social Office installations to Liferay 7. The majority of the upgrade follows the standard Liferay 7 Upgrade Guide.  The Social Office upgrade tool ensures that Social Office is properly upgraded to work with Liferay 7.  Changes to Social Office when upgrading to Liferay 7 is covered below.

Social Office Theme - The Social Office Theme has been removed entirely and the Social Office Upgrade Tool will change over to using the out of the box classic theme.  The idea behind this change it the Social Office theme was never meant to be customized.  Now any custom theme can be used instead of being locked into one theme.  

Social Office Site Templates - Social Office installed a set of Site Templates within Liferay Portal upon installation.  These will be carried forward as a part of the upgrade and will work the same as they did in previous versions of Social Office.  For a fresh installation of Liferay 7  the Site Templates can be recreated and used in a similar fashion.

Customized Liferay Portal Apps - Announcements, Document Library Enhancements, Notifications and Bookmarks had specific customizations for Social Office and these have been merged into Liferay 7.  The Chat application is waiting for changes in Liferay Portal 7.0 CE GA4 and will be released shortly after the release of Liferay Portal 7.0 CE GA4

Social Office specific Apps - Microblogs, Contacts Center and Social Office User Profiles are in Liferay 7 out of the box.  Private Messaging, Event List and WYSIWYG are provided as Marketplace apps (links in documentation. The Tasks application has been removed but the source is still available here and can be upgraded to Liferay 7 if need be.

Social Office UX enhancements - The Social Office Dashboard, Social Office Profile and User bar have been replaced by the Liferay 7 Control Panel and the Go To Menu has been replaced by the My Sites application and can be added to a custom theme in Liferay 7 like in previous versions.

Conclusion

A special thanks goes out to everyone who helped by providing feedback and took the time to help test the tooling and the documentation.

Page Comments
Kim Zeevaarders
8 Years Ago
Hi Jammie,

What about for example the task portlet? This was available in social office but is not present in LR7. Will this portlet be included in LR7? Also, some portlets that were in social office, like the announcements, portlet work differently in LR7 than they did in social office (6.2). For example the announcement portlet does not send notifications anymore. Are these chagne documented somewhere? In our case, it came as a big surpirse that some of the portlets behaved differently after the upgrade from 6.2.2 to 7.0.3

Hope to hear from you,

Kim
Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Jamie Sammons Kim Zeevaarders
8 Years Ago
Hi Kim, The tasks portlet wasn't converted due to low usage. I have converted it in the past as a part of a workshop. I don't seem to have the completed project anymore but can work on doing it again. This would be completely unsupported but should work.

With announcements (and the other applications) it was my understanding they were supposed to be a direct conversion from their 6.2 counterparts to OSGi modules in Liferay 7. Would you mind posting the issue to the Social Office Forums with a list of steps for recreating the issue and then I can check into what's going on?
Please sign in to reply.
Kim Zeevaarders Jamie Sammons
8 Years Ago
Hi Jamie, thanks for the feedback. Managers at my company are screaming for a task portlet and I need to tell them it's not included in liferay 7. I did not expect this, or else i never would have done a upgrade from 6.2 to 7.0.

As far as the announcement portlet is concerned, if you just look at the code you can easily see that it is definitly NOT a direct conversion of the 6.2 counterpart. Main irritation from the business is that NO notifications are sent anymore. Only emails. These are things you cannot know beforehand when upgrading unless you check the codebase of each and every portlet...

I alread spent hours of debugging and analysing liferay to try to solve the many problems that i've encountered after the upgrade to LR7. I will try to spend some time on the announcement portlet in the coming days but i cannot guarantee it since my boss is quite fed up with all the time i need to spent in Liferay just to understand why basic functions are not working as expected!

I hope you get things sorted out in the next GA4 release, because i really love the product and want to keep using it!

Regrards,

Kim

PS. If you have a task-portlet conversion project I would really appreciate it if you could make it publicly available so we can fine-tune and implement it in LR7
Please sign in to reply.
Kim Zeevaarders Jamie Sammons
8 Years Ago
Hi Jamie, thanks for the feedback. Managers at my company are screaming for a task portlet and I need to tell them it's not included in liferay 7. I did not expect this, or else i never would have done a upgrade from 6.2 to 7.0.

As far as the announcement portlet is concerned, if you just look at the code you can easily see that it is definitly NOT a direct conversion of the 6.2 counterpart. Main irritation from the business is that NO notifications are sent anymore. Only emails. These are things you cannot know beforehand when upgrading unless you check the codebase of each and every portlet...

I alread spent hours of debugging and analysing liferay to try to solve the many problems that i've encountered after the upgrade to LR7. I will try to spend some time on the announcement portlet in the coming days but i cannot guarantee it since my boss is quite fed up with all the time i need to spent in Liferay just to understand why basic functions are not working as expected!

I hope you get things sorted out in the next GA4 release, because i really love the product and want to keep using it!

Regrards,

Kim

PS. If you have a task-portlet conversion project I would really appreciate it if you could make it publicly available so we can fine-tune and implement it in LR7
Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Jamie Sammons Kim Zeevaarders
8 Years Ago
Hi Kim, turns out I didn't have the code for the tasks portlet conversion anymore ... So I reconverted it which was good since it needed some additional work from the last time I did it. You can find the Github repo here: https://github.com/sammonsjl/liferay-workspace-tasks
Please sign in to reply.
Kim Zeevaarders Jamie Sammons
8 Years Ago
Hi Jamie,

Thank you very much for putting the effort in it (again emoticon). I will check it out, deploy it and shwocase it to our managers!

Regards,

Kim
Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Anthony Thomas
7 Years Ago
Hello, Jamie and Bryan.

In Liferay DXP, I have been trying to make use of the reconverted tasks portlet Jamie provided with the URL above (https://github.com/sammonsjl/liferay-workspace-tasks). It seems to be working pretty well except for the following two issues.

1) When I click on an existing task, see the Tasks Entry pop-up, enter a comment, and click the Reply button, I am seeing "Your request failed to complete" in the UI and the following stacktrace in my Tomcat log:

20:31:18,973 ERROR [http-nio-8443-exec-8][PortletServlet:112] javax.portlet.PortletException: javax.portlet.PortletException: processAction method not implemented
javax.portlet.PortletException: javax.portlet.PortletException: processAction method not implemented
at com.liferay.portal.kernel.portlet.LiferayPortlet.callActionMethod(LiferayPortlet.java:196)
at com.liferay.portal.kernel.portlet.bridges.mvc.MVCPortlet.callActionMethod(MVCPortlet.java:418)
at com.liferay.portal.kernel.portlet.LiferayPortlet.processAction(LiferayPortlet.java:93)
at com.liferay.portal.kernel.portlet.bridges.mvc.MVCPortlet.processAction(MVCPortlet.java:260)
at com.liferay.portlet.FilterChainImpl.doFilter(FilterChainImpl.java:71)
at com.liferay.portal.kernel.portlet.PortletFilterUtil.doFilter(PortletFilterUtil.java:48)
at com.liferay.portal.kernel.servlet.PortletServlet.service(PortletServlet.java:108)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:729) ...

2) When I click on Add Task, see the Add Task pop-up, fill out the Description, Assignee, and Priority fields, and then click on Add Due Date, the form gets reset (i.e., cleared). It appears that clicking on Add Due Date is causing a form submit or a redirect that starts us over in this pop-up.

These did not seem to be a problem in Liferay Portal 6.2 EE. (I still have a 6.2 installation and just verified that these issues did not occur in it.)

Are you seeing these issues in DXP too? If so, do you have any fixes for them (or suggestions about how we may fix them)?

Also, the tasks/tasks-web/src/main/java/com/liferay/tasks/web/portlet/TasksPortlet.java file did not include "javax.portlet.name=com_liferay_tasks_web_portlet_TasksPortlet" as a property for @Component. Should it include this property?

Anthony Thomas
Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Anthony Thomas
7 Years Ago

FYI for anyone else who may be encountering the same two errors with the Tasks portlet that I identified in my 4/25/18 post above...When I hadn't received any reply after about 2 1/2 months to my post, I created a LESA Liferay Support ticket to see if any help could be obtained that way.  However, I was informed that they are not supporting the Tasks portlet (which Liferay chose not to migrate to DXP along with the other former Liferay Social Office portlets).  Jamie Sammons, at least, tried to help us by providing this converted portlet.  The Liferay Support member who handled my ticket did communicate with Jamie, who told him that he would address these questions in this blog when he can find the time.

Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Jamie Sammons
7 Years Ago

Also I would like to point out that for some of the other applications like Chat, WYSIWYG and Private Messaging will not be ported to Liferay 7.1 .   You can see on their Marketplace page that the version for 7.0 was listed as the Final version of the application.   Unfortunately I won't have the time to maintain these but since they are already ported to 7.0 it may not take much effort for someone to upgrade them to 7.1.

Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Anthony Thomas
7 Years Ago

Hello, Jamie.

 

I see the updated files on https://github.com/sammonsjl/liferay-workspace-tasks.  I'll give them a try.  Thank you for your original conversion of the Tasks portlet and for these new fixes and enhancements.

 

Thanks also for the info that 7.0 will be the terminal marketplace version for Chat, WYSIWYG, and Private Messaging.  Between that and what we have been discussing about the Tasks portlet, it seems like less and less of the social functionality is being maintained and supported going forward.  So, I am getting the impression that people are losing interest in social functionality in Liferay or in Liferay itself.  What do you think?

 

Tony

Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Jamie Sammons Anthony Thomas
7 Years Ago

Hello Tony,

 

Interest in the social functionality was never overly high which lead to the decision to stop maintaining the components.  There were also some technical challenges with Social Office due to the fact that it was a platform customization which made it hard for developers to maintain their own customizations alongside SO. 

 

This allowed us to focus our efforts on providing better core functionality.  In contrast the interest in Liferay itself is increasing more than ever before.  

 

-Jamie

Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Anthony Thomas
7 Years Ago

Thanks for the feedback, Jamie.  Glad to hear that things are going well for Liferay.  The decline of social functionality in it is unfortunate for us, though.  It was one of the things that recommended Liferay to our company when it was evaluating portal candidates.  The sunsetting of the WYSIWYG portlet is another negative since our plan was for our app content admins/developers to present a lot of their content in it to our users.  I'll relay these developments to our management for their awareness.

 

Tony

Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Bryan H Cheung Anthony Thomas
7 Years Ago

Tony, I would clarify that we are deprecating Private Messages and Chat because a lot of users didn't see value in sending private messages and using chat within Liferay (vs. using third party tools like Skype or Slack).

 

As for WYSIWYG, we think there are better ways to achieve the same capabilities using CMS, which is where we're focusing our efforts for improvements. If you see the comments in the Marketplace there were many criticisms about the WYSIWYG portlet's limitations and UI. 

 

But we are definitely still trying to solve the business problem of social collaboration in the digital workplace. 45% of our customers in the US use Liferay for Intranets, and there's still a lot to be done for Liferay to create value there. 

 

We are discussing with our product managers this very week about the 7.2 roadmap for our collaboration features. If you would like to provide input on how your organization works and would get value from Liferay as a social collaboration solution, let us know. 

Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Anthony Thomas
7 Years Ago

Hello, Bryan.

 

Thank you for the clarifications and for the invitation to provide input to Liferay's 7.2 roadmap.  I will relay this info to our management so that they will be aware and will have that opportunity to contribute.

 

At this time, do you know if Liferay is planning to continue maintaining the Calendar, Microblogs, Message Boards, and Contacts Center portlets?  If so, do you think it is possible that the Contacts Center portlet might be enhanced with an option to limit the users displayed to the current site and/or to a list of specified user groups, organizations, and/or users?

 

Also, do you have any idea why a custom role we have created might have trouble seeing the Export/Import option in the Calendar?  I have been through Define Permissions for this role and have granted everything I could find for the Calendar, but the option still does not show up for a user having this role.

 

Tony

Please sign in to reply.
thumbnail
Anthony Thomas
7 Years Ago

Hello, Jamie.

 

I have incorporated the changes you made to TasksPortlet.java, view_comments.jspf, edit_task.jsp, and view_task.jsp.  The functionality to add a comment to an existing task and to specify a due date for a new or existing task seems to be working correctly now.  So, the two issues I had reported now appear to be resolved.

 

Thank you for providing these fixes.

 

Tony

Please sign in to reply.

Related Assets...

No Results Found

More Blog Entries...