Facilitating Collaboration

Abstract

In the previous chapter, you set up discussion forums to let your portal users collaborate with one another by participating in different discussion threads. You can think of this collaboration method as “offline” in that users might not get responses to their postings immediately. You can facilitate several other kinds of collaboration in your portal. Some of these allow real-time communication, meaning the users would be able to participate in live discussions. I’ll discuss several different forms of collaboration in this chapter. In particular, you will learn the following:

• Setting up the mail-client application on your portal

• Popping up e-mail from your Gmail accounts and your Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) accounts

• Sending mail

• Setting up an SMS application and sending SMS messages

• Setting up a live-chat application and using it for multiple concurrent users

• Searching and locating users, organizations, and user groups

• Inviting users to participate in discussions. The first application that we’ll consider is Liferay’ Mail application.