Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets A practical guide to building a complete corporate intranet with Liferay Jonas X. Yuan BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Shawn Williams on 24th November 2009 UW Technology , 4545 15th Ave NE 4th Floor , Seattle, King, 98105 Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets Copyright © 2008 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. 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 ([email protected]) This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Shawn Williams on 24th November 2009 UW Technology , 4545 15th Ave NE 4th Floor , Seattle, King, 98105 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 This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Shawn Williams on 24th November 2009 UW Technology , 4545 15th Ave NE 4th Floor , Seattle, King, 98105 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. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Shawn Williams on 24th November 2009 UW Technology , 4545 15th Ave NE 4th Floor , Seattle, King, 98105 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. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Shawn Williams on 24th November 2009 UW Technology , 4545 15th Ave NE 4th Floor , Seattle, King, 98105 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. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Shawn Williams on 24th November 2009 UW Technology , 4545 15th Ave NE 4th Floor , Seattle, King, 98105 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 This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Shawn Williams on 24th November 2009 UW Technology , 4545 15th Ave NE 4th Floor , Seattle, King, 98105 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 ] This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Shawn Williams on 24th November 2009 UW Technology , 4545 15th Ave NE 4th Floor , Seattle, King, 98105 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 ] This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Shawn Williams on 24th November 2009 UW Technology , 4545 15th Ave NE 4th Floor , Seattle, King, 98105 Table of Contents Chapter 4: Discussion Forums And Tags 95 Working with Message Boards 95 Adding And Managing Categories 96 Adding Categories 96 Managing Categories 98 Adding And Managing