Social Office using Office Integration

One of the cool features of Liferay Social Office is its use of Office Integration.

When collaborating with others it is often a huge hassle to create a document and then email it back and forth with updated versions. You never know if you have the latest version or if someone was left out of the latest update email blast. Social Office takes care of that problem. With a view of the version history, you are sure to be up to date with the latest version and everyone who is a part of the community (i.e., site) that the document is in will be able to see and download the most updated version as well. If you need to share the document after people have already been collaborating for awhile, simply add them to the site and they will have access to all the versions.

How is this done you ask?

Well, currently, you can only open and save documents to your computer from the doc library in Social Office. Eventually, you will also be able to edit, save, and then upload documents directly from the doc library. As of right now the way to edit and save new versions of a document is by using the following path.

1. Create a folder in the doc library and upload the document you want to share.

2. Open up microsoft office on your desktop

3. Choose 'file - open' and type in the ip address (plus /sharepoint) of the location where Social Office is hosted.

*** if the ip address is correct, you will be asked to provide a user name and password***

4. Navigate to the doc library folder where the document you wish to edit is located.

5. The document will then open in MS word. Once you have edited and saved the file, in Social Office, navigate to the doc library where the document is stored.

6. Refresh the page and the new version will be displayed. here are some screen shots of some versions of a document I created.

As Social Office is updated the ability to do this directly from the doc library will be added.

18 Comments

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This looks very nice! Are there any plans to cross-pollinate features like this to Liferay Portal?

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All these same features are available in Liferay Portal as well. One way to put it is, Liferay Portal is the framework, and Liferay Social Office is our customization of this framework (custom portlets, themes, properties, etc.). Core functionality is identical between the two.

What differs is the user experience because we spend a lot more time customizing the user experinece in Social Office for a specific use case, whereas Liferay Portal is for a more generic use case.

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Perfect. That's what I was hoping the response would be emoticon

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Very intuitive with the screen-captures! Thanks for your time.

I was wondering if we come up some sort of desktop widgets that we can drag-n-drop the docs/objects from/to the doc library on the portal server.

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The sort of desktop widgets you want may be like alfresco "share drive",you could look at www.alfresco.com for more detail.

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Hi Dafang, we do have support for WebDAV level 2, which allows you to mount a shared drive on your desktop to which you can drag and drop documents to and from the document library. Have you tried this?

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Cool! Liferay Social Office would provide even better look and feel than Alfresco Share Driver. It would be nice that the specific portlet (such as so-portlet) and theme (such as so-theme) could be generalized as well. So that Liferay Social Office could be customized and extended easily.

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I have had no luck to make this work -- I'm using Vista SP1 with Office 2007.

When I tried to copy a file into the mapped folder (http://localhost:8080/sharepoint/Admin Admin [10709]), I got such exception:

04:36:04,556 ERROR [SharepointServlet:100] com.liferay.portal.sharepoint.Sharepo
intException: com.liferay.portlet.documentlibrary.NoSuchFolderException: No DLFo
lder exists with the primary key 0
com.liferay.portal.sharepoint.SharepointException: com.liferay.portlet.documentl
ibrary.NoSuchFolderException: No DLFolder exists with the primary key 0
at com.liferay.portal.sharepoint.methods.BaseMethodImpl.process(BaseMeth
odImpl.java:53)
at com.liferay.portal.sharepoint.SharepointServlet.doPost(SharepointServ
let.java:96)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:647)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:729)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(Appl

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This all looks great! Many thanks.

Just an FYI, the tutorial etc use office 2007 and when I tried it, it gave errors when trying to upload via the web interface because of the docx extention instead of the old doc extention. Its small I know, but the listed of accetable extentions might want to be broadened

Again, this looks great guys. I was busy working on an Alfresco, Wiki, and Intranet solution and put everything on hold as LR is a one stop shop.

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Hi Ryan, added as an issue:

http://issues.liferay.com/browse/SOS-44

Are you still having trouble creating a JIRA account?

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sorry for a newbie question ;-) Are there other sharepoint integrations available with either social office or liferay? such as being able to pull information bidirectionally from a sharepoint server (out of the box)?

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Nice feature. But is it tested with Microsoft Office 2007? When I tried to open the location it opens the login page in Word.

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Cool feature and the guide.
I was looking for this on the wiki and it took me some time to finally find it in the blog. There is a Chinese version of this document in the wiki, so I suggest to at least provide a link from the wiki to this blog, if not have the full guide there.

Thanks!
Goran

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I have an issue with "Internet address ... is not valid" when I try to open document in MS-Word, and I found that is Microsoft's issue:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929360/

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Can you please ask Microsoft to fix WebDAV problems in Windows Vista 64-bit (SP2), and even Windows 7 64-bit...
Thanks

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Hi, I would like to use this feature but i don't know how does it work whith a non root context. My url is http://localhost:8080/portal, I tryed http://localhost:8080/portal/sharepoint and http://localhost:8080/sharepoint but both doesn't works.

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Hi, This is very interesting. Thanks for the wonderful article. I managed to setup this easily with the instructions. However I noticed an issue when two users access the same document using the method given here. I used the MSWord 2003 on windows XP. Both users can edit the document at the same time(different Computers). However if the second user view the document using the social office then a message says that the document is locked. the following error is recorded in the log when the second user opens the document.

I'm wondering is this something that needs to be fixed or is it my configuration ?

Thanks for your support.

May 6, 2010 11:07:53 PM org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol start
INFO: Starting Coyote HTTP/1.1 on http-8080
May 6, 2010 11:07:53 PM org.apache.jk.common.ChannelSocket init
INFO: JK: ajp13 listening on /0.0.0.0:8009
May 6, 2010 11:07:53 PM org.apache.jk.server.JkMain start
INFO: Jk running ID=0 time=0/31 config=null
May 6, 2010 11:07:53 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start
INFO: Server startup in 386316 ms
23:15:46,281 ERROR [SharepointServlet:69] com.liferay.portal.NoSuchGroupExceptio
n: No Group exists with the primary key 0
com.liferay.portal.NoSuchGroupException: No Group exists with the primary key 0
at com.liferay.portal.service.persistence.GroupPersistenceImpl.findByPri
maryKey(GroupPersistenceImpl.java:632)
at com.liferay.portal.service.impl.GroupLocalServiceImpl.getGroup(GroupL
ocalServiceImpl.java:463)
at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor122.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAcces
sorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585)
at org.springframework.aop.support.AopUtils.invokeJoinpointUsingReflecti
on(AopUtils.java:307)
at org.springframework.aop.framework.ReflectiveMethodInvocation.invokeJo
inpoint(ReflectiveMethodInvocation.java:182)
at org.springframework.aop.framework.ReflectiveMethodInvocation.proceed(
ReflectiveMethodInvocation.java:149)
at org.springframework.transaction.interceptor.TransactionInterceptor.in
voke(TransactionInterceptor.java:106)
at org.springframework.aop.framework.ReflectiveMethodInvocation.proceed(
ReflectiveMethodInvocation.java:171)
at org.springframework.aop.interceptor.ExposeInvocationInterceptor.invok
e(ExposeInvocationInterceptor.java:89)
at org.springframework.aop.framework.ReflectiveMethodInvocation.proceed(
ReflectiveMethodInvocation.java:171)

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Can we integrate sharpoint with LRSO document library???

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