OpenCms is a fully featured content management system. However it lacks built-in features for user driven content and social interaction like activities, circles and followers. To create „Social Connect“, Helmut and his team extended OpenCms to contain some of those features. Social Connect is a pure open source solution hosted on GitHub and we are looking forward to even more enhancements in the near future. Helmut is going to illustrate how a user can compose his personal dashboard of various information sources. The dashboard can show topics or persons of his personal interest, external third party feeds or changes within OpenCms in general. Each information source delivers a short abstract of the latest changes in that area. Thus the user gets a quick overview of the latest news in all areas he is involved in and may drill down on demand. This information aggregation can be used on a personal level. It can also be used to build pages belonging to a specific topic, gathering information across external and internal sources and display a concise topic centered overview. The data exchange is based on industry standards like RSS-Feeds and portlets and can be extended easily.

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Social Connect
Information Aggregation
and social connections in OpenCms
1. Oct 2013

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What is Social?
• Different “social” flavors available:
• Twitter-Style
• Follow/Being Followed
• Xing/linked in
• Profile/Skills/Discussions
• Facebook
• “Like”
• Comments
• Timelines
• Chat/Conversations/Messages
• Alfresco, Liferay etc
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Features Social Collaboration
• Focusing on Organizations / Companies:
• Xing Profiles: Interesting (for large Companies), but mostly Content
• Groupware Functions: Calendar, Mails (Exchange et al.)
• Document sharing (Sharepoint, Alfresco et al.)
• Online Messaging
• We liked: sharing news across different media/channels
Twitter Follow / Facebook Comment
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Area tightly covered with highly featured products!

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Existing Collaboration Software
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Partial Integration only!
Initial Target:
News forwarding not possible

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Focus: Social Collaboration
• Focusing on Organizations / Companies:
• Xing Profiles: Interesting (for large Companies), but mostly Content
• Groupware Functions: Calendar, Mails (Exchange et al.)
• Document sharing (Sharepoint, Alfresco et al.)
• Online Messaging
• We liked: sharing news across different media/channels
Twitter Follow / Facebook Comment
Integration of existing services / data sources!
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Integrate
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Integration Approach
• Thesis: For Social Features to work, you need mostly teasers, not fully
featured content.
So, why not extract teasers from those applications and “deep link” to
the information source for further (inter-)action / when the User wants
more
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Integration: Short Excursion
• Example Yammer
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How to implement
• Many Information sources (Software Repositories, Customer
Database, Intellectual Property) shall not leave the Enterprise /
Company / Organization
• Adapters are required to interface backend systems
• Installable Software required / Privacy
Well suited problem for OpenCms Portal
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RSS de facto for syndication
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IMAP/ICal
SVN
/ ICal
RSS

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(Enterprise) Application Integration
• Write some Portlets for
• Aggregation of data
• This must support different data sources (pull and search)
• Chat
• XMPP etc (search)
• Profiles
• LDAP search (search only)
• Use OpenCms for
• Content / SOLR / Templating
• Search must be handled in OpenCms and Portlets (later)
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Social Connect: Overview
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Architectural Overview
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Tomcat
Portlet: Timeline
Portlet: Chat XMPP

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Detail View: Timeline / Activity Portlet
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Social Connect
(Follow, Post etc.)
Search Engine
RSS
ICal
Adapter3
Adapter4

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Integrated Search
• Extended search:
• Having teasers “pulled” to a dashboard/timeline is nice, but not the whole
story
Information should be searchable
Content someone changed (either html or Office files),
The telephone directory, Emails, Customers Details (CRM / ERP), Part
numbers, database records in general
Search must return “deep links” to Backing Applications
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Chat: XMPP Support
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Outlook: Document Sharing and Project
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CMIS, Sharepoint
Jira, Trac, Redmine

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Current State
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Full Open Source Project
• OpenCms Portal in Version 8.5.1 on Github and Sonatype
• Demo does not contain “Social Connect” yet.
• Social Connect: Portlets for Chat and Activity will be released on Github
and integrated into the demo (some bugs still present)
• https://github.com/eonas/opencmsportal/wiki
Mailing List
• Yet to come / when people are interested.
• mailto: helmut.manck@eonas.de

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Thank You
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Questions?