derekdemoro

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Facebook for the Enterprise (Well Sorta)

Posted by Derek DeMoro on Sep 29, 2008 9:22:04 PM

I hear it almost everytime I talk to a customer. FACEBOOK for the Enterprise. Or "You know, like Facebook", or "They all use Facebook. They want that experience." It goes on and on. Now, I'm not actually pushing or even agree to a large extent of the value proposition of Facebook internally. The permissions are garbage and limited, true collaboration is not existent, and well, it's messy.

 

What people are looking for is a way to engage their workers by enabling them to collaborate in a familiar manner. Many times, that experience steems from their facebook usage. Other times, they just assume that Facebook is the standard by which all should be compared, even though they have never seen Facebook.  I'm not uber opinionated with things like this. I feel everyones experience is different. Their needs are different and should be met. With that in mind.  What is a good way to give your employees a Facebook-like experience? Well, give them Facebook (But not really ).

 

So.... with that in mind. Let's make Clearspace look and feel like Facebook.

 

 

How can I make Clearspace look and feel like Facebook?

  1. You need two things:
  2. What does it look like?


front_page.gif

3. In the theme, the default is "OneCompany" logo. You can replace this by changing the cllogo.gif to whatever you like.

4. That's it Enjoy.


Disclaimer/Note: If this is in violation of any trademark laws, I do apologize and will change. This is a proof of technology of sorts and just used to show how fun and easy it is using Clearspace.

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Nov 15, 2008 7:32 PM Guest aagasofb

aagasofb

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Sep 29, 2008 9:33 PM Guest Gia Lyons  says:

Dude. I heart working with you. This was soooo fun to demo at that one place.

 

All, if you wanna see the pic in a larger format, just click on it. Default behavior in Clearspace.

Sep 29, 2008 9:36 PM Derek DeMoro Derek DeMoro    says in response to Gia Lyons:

Gia, yeah. Ditto kiddo. This one was awesome to demo. Afterwards, I went ahead and removed the theme for "usability", but they asked that I put it back because "they just really like the Facebook look and feel". 

Sep 29, 2008 10:59 PM Guest Daniel Henninger  says:

Very cool man!  Great work! 

Sep 30, 2008 11:02 AM Guest Paul Biggs  says:

This is sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick. Dang. Ninja skills in action.

Sep 30, 2008 4:45 PM Guest Dan McCall  says:

You are my hero... this Rocks!

Sep 30, 2008 8:40 PM Guest Dan McCall  says:

Where do I put the theme file?

Sep 30, 2008 9:31 PM Derek DeMoro Derek DeMoro    says in response to Dan McCall:

Hi Dan,

   Extract the jar file under the "themes" directory of your jiveHome. Then in the admin, under System |  Setting | Themes, choose "Facebook" as your global theme. (Or, map it to a particular community or URL).

 

Cheers,

Derek

Oct 1, 2008 12:50 AM Guest Dan McCall  says in response to Derek DeMoro:

So we got it installed and were playing around with it.  We're experiencing a lot of issues around the placement of widgets.  For example, when I try to put the "my status" widget at the top and the "my places" widget on the right hand column it rearranges them when I click publish.  Any thoughts?  We are using 2.5.2

Oct 1, 2008 12:53 AM Derek DeMoro Derek DeMoro    says in response to Dan McCall:

Hi Dan,

 Grab the latest facebookish.jar from this blog. It was strange behavior from a css call. Weird but fixed.

 

Cheers,

Derek

Oct 4, 2008 10:09 AM Guest Jay  says in response to Derek DeMoro:

Hey Derek,

 

I'd like to apply it to one subcommunity but only see the "my ..." widgets when customizing the top page.  I didn't look in the XML, is this something that can be changed by configuration or is it by design?

 

Great plugin and theme.

 

Jay

Oct 8, 2008 12:02 AM Guest Jay  says in response to Jay:

Hey,

 

One thing that's been bugging me is that facebook only makes sense when you're logged in, you can't view it without being a member.  I don't know of an (easy) way in CS to toggle a theme and plugin based on whether the user is logged in. 

 

Maybe a better approach would be to apply the theme and plugin to a set of communities that you have to be registered to view.  This way you could have a regular CS and partition off a Facebook-like theme/experience for special communities.  Thoughts?

 

Jay

 

Jay

Oct 8, 2008 4:48 PM Derek DeMoro Derek DeMoro    says in response to Jay:

Hey Jay,

  I"m not following. Why would you NOT want the theme to be used? Are you talking more about the feed aspect. Oh I'm so confused.

 

-D

Oct 8, 2008 10:37 PM Guest Jay  says in response to Derek DeMoro:

Maybe I shouldn't post late at night.

 

So I want to have just one community themed like Facebook, not the entire installation.  Don't ask me why, it's just what I want and I'll throw a fit if I don't get it.  The rest of the instance I want to be my normal CS look and feel.  I can *kind of* see how to do it by applying the facebook theme just to the one community but that is problematic as all the other tertiary stuff like profiles, etc. won't be Facebook- themed.  Also as I noted above I don't see the Facebook widgets when I'm customizing a subcommunity, I only see them on the top page.  Is this by design?

 

Maybe there is no good use case for a single community with a separate behavior and look and feel.  It's just how I figured I'd set it up in my instance when I was messing with it.

 

Jay

Copyright ©2008 Derek DeMoro — Views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer.