20 Mar

Liferay as a Main Alternative for Your Enterprise Portal

Liferay can be the main alternative for company as an enterprise portal/intranet portal solutioin. Liferay Portal is easy to use and open source licensed. So companies that want high valued Enterprise Portal solutions can divert his choice to Liferay. Liferay Portal provides the facilities, both intranet and extranet.

Customization in Liferay is easier. It uses a drag & drop, so users only need a mouse to select the menu you want displayed. If companies need tools for collaboration and knowledge management, such as instant messaging, blogs and wikis, and access to all content, and information organization.

The interface displayed Liferay is very interesting and easy for users to use existing facilities, content management is also easy to use, users or developers do not need to have to master programming language in detail, and no special skills required during installation of the portal site. In this installation, the package has been integrated Liferay with other packages, such as Apache Tomcat web application server and Java Runtime Environment.

Liferay Portal provides a clear view of the general interface and the menu is made as simple as possible, so that all levels of users can use it.

Some special features that exist in Liferay are as follows:

Flexible Portal Integration Framework , Liferay Portal allows users, administrators and developers integrate content and services from backend applications and support several methods, including SOAP, REST, RSS and APIs.

Out-of-the-box tools , Liferay provides various tools for CMS and Collaboration functionality

Secure Single Sign On (SSO) , only with a one-time authentication, users can securely and comfortable access to all menus

Customization Tools , an administrator can make adjustments, make changes, add users or other attributes such as name, company, date, or other information considered important, all of which can be performed without any modification of the database. Liferay also provide support facilities to the page content sites, blogs, share documents and data storage folder, and messages that exist on the forum, the wiki is very reliable if needed in the enterprise portal.

User Personalization , if given the right of access by adminitrator, then the user is entitled to configure the portal page by adding, deleting, or fill the position of the content. Users also can store data and later distributed to other users who are still in one network.

Content-Based Sharing , Liferay considered reliable in sharing content and messages that are sent through the facilities of the forum, so users do not need to use email only to to send messages. Liferay also provides a menu for users in making changes in content and appearance

Basically, Liferay is able to make the enterprise portal as required, some other interesting features are also very worth to try and developed further.
20 Feb

Tool to make Custom Model in Alfresco

In one of the ECM implementation - Alfresco - we need to implement content type and document metadata that have been designed previously.

There are about 24 types of documents, and there are about 100 metadata that need to be built in Alfresco. Of the 100 about metadata, there are several properties that are shared properties. If calculated, each document type on average has 15 metadata.

If using conventional methods, we estimate it will take about 1 week to make it. Then we try to find a way or tool that can be used to shorten the construction time, and we found SIDE-Labs. Sidelabs is an IDE that can be used developers to design custom models, and even workflow in Alfresco. By using the SIDE-Labs, we will save much time on custom model development.

Finally it only take 1 day to make 24 content types and approximately 100 metadata. For comparison, a web-client-config-custom.xml have around 1700 lines of code, and customModel.xml has about 2300 codes. Imagine if developers have to do it conventionally.

So if you plan to do in-house development with Alfresco, and you have a lot of types of documents, we strongly recommend to use the SIDE-Labs as a tool.
12 Nov

Change Management for Enterprise Content Management Implementation - Softbless

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System Implementation is different with software implementation. For software, we can simply provide training to End Users.
For the system, in addition to training, there is a need to have Change Management done to achieve the successful implementation of the system, namely:
  • Socialization to the End User
  • Encourage early involvement from End User
  • Build a user-oriented ECM
  • Reward Socialization to End Users.

    Socialization needs to be done so that users have the correct expectations of system. And User can imagine how the activities to be conducted in later date. Basically, human beings tend to be reluctant to change in everything, including the day-to-day office activities.
    Socialization could reduce rejection from End Users. Socialization can be done through :

    Forum that is attended by the management, to provide a signal that implementation of this system is supported by the management. Top-Down Approach is tend to be more successful in system implementation. In this forum do not discuss technically about the ECM system, but rather to emphasize the benefits of this ECM
    Besides forum, then it could be done through a notification via company magazine or company newsletter

    Encourage early involvement from End User
    From the kick off the project, the End User must always be involved.
    They can be questioned useful inputs for them. In this way, End User have a sense of belonging to this system. Their inputs may not possible to be all fulfilled, but at least by involving them, they will more have an interest in this system.

    A User-Oriented ECM

    The majority of ECM can be customized according to need. However, the most important is how to make a more user friendly ECM system. Starting from little things like
    What information must be displayed on the frontpage, when the user first login
    Folder structure for the division in the ECM must be adapted to the structure an existing folder on the computer each End User.

    Reward

    To further motivate the End User, we could also use rewards, such as : the first division that use full ECM
    for office activities, will get a reward eg shopping vouchers with a specific value for each staff.