Blogs

Hi everyone 

In my first blog post almost one year ago, I talked about our Calendar Mobile Sync project, a free and open-source plugin which enables users to synchronize their Liferay calendars with Android and iOS devices, Mozilla Thunderbird clients, etc. via the CalDAV protocol. I also introduced our Calendar Connector for Exchange, a solution to synchronize Liferay calendars with Exchange Server and Exchange Online.

During these past months we worked very hard at SMC to make the Liferay Calendar even more connected: not an isolated silo of data hidden in a portal page, but an integral part of the enterprise software ecosystem. We talked with our customers and collected their requirements, and now I'd like to share with you a glimpse of what we baked last year, plus some info about the good things that are currently in the oven 

...but the world of calendar events, sharing and synchronization, with its myriad standards, clients and protocols, is definitely a complex world! So maybe a (very simplified and incomplete) map can help us to understand it a bit better.

As you can see, we developed a series of plugins to open the Liferay Calendar to the outside world, both calendaring servers and clients. We can now seamlessly synchronize Liferay calendars with these servers:

• Exchange Server and Exchange Online, via our Calendar Connector for Exchange (paid plugin, currently on the Liferay Marketplace)
• Google Calendar, via our Calendar Connector for Google (free and available on the Liferay Marketplace, but a new and improved version is coming)
• CalDAV servers such as Zimbra and OpenCRX, via our Calendar Connector for CalDAV (currently in testing)

For the record, the latter two are based on our Asset Sync framework, which is part of our ECM solution for Liferay and is something I'm especially proud of. I talked about it in my session at the 2014 Liferay Symposium in Boston.

This way, Liferay can now display all the events and act as a front-end for different calendaring services, all in one single place and with built-in Single Sign-on. For example, the Calendar portlet can be configured to display the user's personal Google Calendar, the employee calendar which resides in the company's Exchange Server, and more events and activities coming from a CRM software. An example: the marketing department starts a campaign by using the internal CRM and assigns activities to different employees; each employee can see her activities in a page of the intranet portal together with her other work and personal events, and collaborate with her colleagues to find a better planning, organize meetings and so on. And, thanks to our CalDAV synchronization module, she'll be able to interact with her calendars from her mobile device as well.

We invite you to have a look and try our plugins (some of which are free, while others have a 30-day trial period), and give us feedback in the comments of this post or in our Support page, it will be really appreciated

And stay tuned, because more and more very interesting things are in the works, such as the new Address Book portlet we recently developed: not only it has support for multiple address books, contact lists, and two-way synchronization with Exchange Server, but it aims to become the "one-stop shop" for contacts in an organization, thanks to its pluggable structure which can be used to integrate external contact repositories. Of course, our future plans will involve tasks and activities, always keeping the focus on collaboration and integration with enterprise systems and external services. Indeed, these are just our first humble steps towards our vision of a complete PIM solution built on top of Liferay.