Talking about integration

You all know that Liferay gives you many tools for quick integration with other application.

If it’s Java application you can deploy WAR file and with little luck you will see a new portlet with your app in Add application menu.
If it’s served as on separate page you can always show it in IFRAME portlet or in Proxy portlet.

You can also integrate you several applications using SSO, OpenID and LDAP.

But what if you want to always communicate to your users that they are still in your system?

For example let’s take combination of 3 apps: Liferay+OLAT LMS+Lime Survey. I know you can replace Lime Survey with Orbeon forms but here it serves another purpose – it’s not written in JAVA. First and easiest step is to share users through LDAP. In all those apps all is done by selecting proper option in control panel. Now let’s do SSO. Here you will ran into some problems as Lime Survey doesn’t have any CAS integration out of the box.  You can avoid that by selecting apps that support the same authorization solutions. And after that you will have nice pack of apps. But this not the way users see it.

Form their perspective those are different apps they have to learn to use. In most cases they will not even share same look and colors. And when they use their own window system and portlets and they check if it’s opened in IFRAME users will go nuts trying to go back to their Private Page (Liferay) from Learning Course (OLAT LMS). What you can do is to provide on all you apps somekind of unified “frequently used links” listing. And as you generally use Liferay the best way it will be to show it in the manner of Dockbar. Sounds interesting to you? If yes, than vote for ticket LPS-12281. Maybe it will be done as a part of “100 Paper Cuts” program.

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