Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets: A practical guide to building a complete corporate intranet with Liferay

405 Pages·2008·12.64 MB·English

by  Jonas X. Yuan

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Liferay Portal Enterprise
Intranets
A practical guide to building a complete corporate
intranet with Liferay
Jonas X. Yuan

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets
Copyright © 2008 Packt Publishing
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However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: April 2008
Production Reference: 1220408
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847192-72-1
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar ([e-mail])
Credits
Author Project Manager
Jonas Yuan Abhijeet Deobhakta
Reviewer Project Coordinator
C.J.S Hayward Abhijeet Deobhakta
Senior Acquisition Editor Indexer
David Barnes Hemangini Bari
Development Editor Proofreader
Ved Jha Nina Hasso
Technical Editor Production Coordinator
Usha Iyer Shantanu Zagade
Copy Editor Cover Work
Sumathi Sridhar Shantanu Zagade
Editorial Team Leader
Mithil Kulkarni
About the Author
Jonas X. Yuan is a senior technical analyst at CIGNEX. Jonas holds a Ph. D in
Computer Science from the University of Zurich, where he focused on Integrity
Control in Federated Database Systems. He earned his M.S and B.S. degrees from
China, where he conducted research on expert systems for predicting landslides.
Jonas is experienced in Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Previously, he has
worked as a Project Manager and a Technical Architect in Web GIS (Geographic
Information System). He has extensive, hands on skills in J2EE technologies.
Specifically, he had developed a BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
Engine called BPELPower from scratch at NASA data center. He also has experiences
on content management related to the medical-legal area. Furthermore, he is an
expert in Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Alfresco, Portals such as
Liferay and full integration of Liferay, Alfresco, LDAP and SSO.
I would like to thank team members at Liferay, especially thank
Bryan Cheung, Jorge Ferrer, Michael Young, Raymond Auge, Brian
Chan, Jerry Niu, Ed Shin, Craig Kaneko and Brian Kim of Liferay for
providing me with valuable information and all the support.

My special thanks to all my team members at CIGNEX for making
this book a reality. I would like to thank Navin Nagiah, CEO of
CIGNEX for his encouragement and great support; without him, this
book would not have been written. Furthermore thanks to Munwar
Shariff and Mike W. Walker for introducing me to the publishers.
Amit Babaria, Harish Ramachandran, Jarred Parris, and our sales
and presales team at CIGNEX helped me understand what the
customers' demands are. Our consulting team at CIGNEX, Srini
Sridhar, Zakir Laliwala, Harshad Bakshi and Zankar Shah presented
me with the various flavors of Liferay implementations with real-life
examples. I am thankful to them.

I sincerely thank and appreciate David Barnes and Ved Prakash Jha,
Senior Acquisition Editor and Development Editor respectively at
Packt Publishing for criticizing and fixing my writing style. Thanks
to Abhijeet Deobhakta, and Usha Iyer and entire team at Packt
Publishing and it was really joyful working with them.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents and my wife,
Linda, for their love, understanding and encouragement. A special
thanks to my wonderful and understanding kid Josua.
About the Reviewer
C.J.S. Hayward is an author and IT professional who loves to create. He holds
a master's degrees in math (UIUC) and theology (Cambridge). His main site,
JonathansCorner.com, showcases different creations: short stories and Socratic
dialogue, science fiction and fantasy, CGI and OSS, musing and mystic spark, a role
playing world and a four dimensional maze, novellas, artwork, poetry, philosophy
and theology, dreamlike vision and energetic endeavors, plus a game review for
meatspace. (His works are available in print from CJSHayward.com.) He has lived
in the U.S., Malaysia, England, and France and is a parishioner of St. Innocent of
Moscow Russian Orthodox Church.
Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Introducing Liferay for Your Intranet 9
What Are We Going to Build? 9
Hosted Discussions 9
Collaborative Documents Using Wikis 10
Team And Individual Blogs 10
Shared Calendars 11
Document Stores 11
And More...! 11
Everything in One Place 12
Introducing Palm Tree Publications 12
Why Use Liferay To Build An Intranet? 14
It's Got The Features We Need 14
It's Easy To Set up and Use 14
It's Free And Open Source 15
It Will Grow with You 15
It Works with Other Tools 15
It Is Based on "Standards" 16
What Else Can Liferay Do? 16
Corporate Extranets 16
Collaborative Websites 17
Content Management & Web Publishing 17
Infrastructure Portals 18
Finding More Information 18
Summary 19
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: Set-up The Home PageAnd Navigation Structure for
The Intranet 21
Experiencing Liferay Portal 22
Quick Liferay Portal Installation 22
What's Happening Behind? 23
Understanding Portlets 23
Using Portlet Container 24
How Does A Portal Work? 24
How Does A Portlet Work? 24
Applying Portlet Life-cycle 26
Setting up Liferay Portal 27
Using Liferay Portal Bundled with Tomcat 5.5 in Windows 28
Using Liferay Portal Bundled with Tomcat 6.x in Linux 29
Using More Options for Liferay Portal Installation 30
Flexible Deployment Matrix 30
Customizing Personal Area 32
Add Pages 33
Remove Pages 34
Add Portlets 35
Remove Portlets 35
Changing Layout Templates 36
Setting up Portal Pages 37
Managing Pages 37
Add A Child Page 37
Change Display Order 38
Merge Pages 38
Change The Logo 39
Edit A Page 39
Delete A Page 40
Changing Themes 41
How Do You Customize Portlets ? 42
How Do You Navigate The Structure of Intranet Site? 43
How to Configure Liferay Portal? 44
Customizing Mail Servers 45
Configuring Portal Paths 46
Customizing Configuration 46
Setting up Extension Environment 47
Summary 49
Chapter 3: Bringing In Users 51
Managing My Account 51
Accessing The Portal 52
Logging into The Portal 52
[ ii ]
Table of Contents
Updating Your Profile 53
Adding and Managing Users 54
Working with Organizations 55
Adding A Top-level Organization 55
Managing Organizations 56
Using Organizations Effectively 59
Working with Locations 60
Adding A Location for The Enterprise 60
Managing Locations 60
Using Locations Effectively 64
Bringing in Users 64
Adding Users 64
Managing Users 67
User Groups And Communities 71
Adding A User Group 72
Managing User Groups 73
Adding More Administrators 74
Enterprise Admin 76
Organization Admin 76
Authentication Methods 76
Working with LDAP Server 76
What Happens Next? 78
Use LDAP Effectively 79
General Configurations 79
Working with SSO CAS 80
What Happens Next? 81
Working with OpenID 81
Working with Roles 82
Adding a Role 82
Managing Roles 83
View Roles 83
Search Roles 83
Edit A Role 83
Delete Roles 83
Assign Enterprise Permissions to A Role 84
Assign Roles 84
Using Roles Effectively 85
Working with Permissions 86
Assign Individual Portlet Permissions 87
Assign Default Permissions 88
Assign Individual Permissions 88
Delegate Permissions 89
Using Permissions Effectively 91
Applying Full Access Control Security Model 92
Summary 94
[ iii ]