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sending-alerts-and-announcements-in-your-portal |
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Suppose you're running a portal with lots of users. Maybe you have thousands or tens of thousands of users (or more!). Wouldn't it be nice to have an easy way to periodically communicate important information to them? And wouldn't it be even nicer to have easy ways to periodically send information to specific groups of users? For example, maybe you'd like to send a reminder about a new policy to all of the site administrators on your portal. Or maybe you'd like to send a reminder to all the members of a certain site to submit an answer to this week's poll question. Liferay provides two portlets that meet this need: the Alerts portlet and the Announcements portlet.
The Alerts and Announcements portlets let you broadcast important information to different groups of users. Each alert or announcement can be created in a specific scope so that you can manage which announcements are sent to which users. Furthermore, each portal user can configure how they'd like to receive announcements: click on [User Name] → My Account from the Dockbar and then on Announcements in the Miscellaneous category. There's a menu for customizing the delivery options for alerts and announcements. You can select a different configuration for each type of alert or announcement: General, News, or Test. Each kind of announcement that's broadcast to a user is viewable from the Alerts or Announcements portlet, of course. But alerts and announcements can also be sent via email or SMS (Short Message Service, i.e., text).
You can also create roles in Liferay to assign to users that should have access to announcing general announcements. For instance, if you'd like an employee in your site to have strict control over what is announced, you can assign them to an Announcements role. To create a simple Announcement role, you'll need to navigate to the Control Panel → Roles → Add → Regular Role. Specify the name of your role as Announcements, click Save, and then select the Define Permissions tab. For this particular role, you'll need to grant two permissions:
- Control Panel → General Permissions → Add General Announcements
- Site Administration → Applications → Announcements → Add Entry
You'll need to click Save after selecting each permission. Now you have a simple Announcements role that can add an entry to the Announcements portlet and add general announcements to your site! Of course, you can add additional permissions to give the Announcements role more access, if you prefer.
Let's look at how to create announcements in the Announcements portlet. When you view the Announcements portlet as an administrator, you'll see two tabs: Entries and Manage Entries. Non-administrators only see the Entries tab which displays a list of announcements. To add a new announcement, click on Manage Entries and then select a Distribution Scope. The distribution scope determines the group of users to which your announcement is sent. Announcements created in the General distribution scope are sent to everyone. If the distribution scope is set a particular site or role, only members of that site or role receive the announcements.
Once you've selected a distribution scope, you'll see a list of all the announcements that have already been created in that scope. You can click the Actions button next to an announcement to edit or delete it. Click Add to create a new announcement. In addition to the Distribution scope, you can provide the following information:
Title: The title of the announcement. When the announcement is displayed in the portlet, the full title always appears in bold. If a URL was entered, the title serves as a link to the site specified in the URL field.
URL: The URL is optional. If entered, it must be a valid URL, starting with http://. For example, an announcement about a news story could include a link to the news article.
Content: The body of the announcement. You can use the familiar CK editor to write the body of your announcement. Use the Source button to switch between the editor view and the HTML view.
Type: Can be General, News, or Test. Each user can specify a different delivery mechanism for each type of announcement. For example, a user can specify that she'd like to receive general announcements via email and text, news announcement via email only, and no special delivery mechanism for test announcements. Each user can customize their delivery options by navigating to [User Name] → My Account from the Dockbar and then clicking on Announcements in the Miscellaneous category.
Priority: Can be either Normal or Important.
Display Date: This determines when the announcement will be sent to users and will appear in the Announcements portlet. By default, the Display Immediately box is flagged. This sets the display date to be equal to the creation date. Unflag this box if you'd like to enter a custom display date. For example, administrators can create announcements that won't be displayed until a specified future date. This date can be days, weeks, months, or years in the future. Once the Display Immediately box is unflagged, clicking on the Display Date field opens the date-picker widget.
Expiration Date: This determines when the announcement expires. Once an announcement expires, it's no longer displayed by the Announcements portlet to any users. Clicking on the Expiration Date field opens the date-picker widget.
The Alerts portlet works the same way as the announcements portlet. It's a different portlet because it's designed to be be used only for important messages or message that may require users to take some action. The Alerts portlet only displays alerts and the Announcements portlet only displays alerts. The Alerts portlet displays alerts with a bold red box around each alert message to draw attention to the displayed entries. Site administrators can place the Alerts and Announcement portlets on different pages if they'd like to separate important alerts from more mundane announcements.
Next, let's see what you can do with Liferay's Chat feature.