eXo Platform 3.5

## Chapter 1. Overview of eXo Social

## About eXo Social

### What is eXo Social

eXo Social gives rich experiences to your end-users via many options that are similar to social networks, such as Facebook and Linkedln. With eXo Social, you can establish more meaningful connection and improve your communication and collaboration.

By turning your company directory into a social network, eXo Social allows you to add details, including experiences, skills and team information, to profiles of yourself and another contacts.

Besides, eXo Social provides built-in JavaScript client libraries for OpenSocial API that allows developers to write social gadgets intuitively and easily for displaying and mashing up activity information for contacts, applications, services and social networks.

As an extended service of eXo Platform, eXo Platform allows built-in applications and other extended services to be added to collaboration features within the eXo Social network, providing many capabilities, such as Calendar, Address Book, Chat, Email, and more.

#### About this guide

The eXo Social User Guide is a reference for all users who want to learn more about features of eXo Social. Basically, features of eXo Social are remained, regardless of being implemented as a standalone application or one extended service of eXo Platform. This guide is based on the standalone eXo Social deployment. Before reading this guide, you should be aware of installing eXo Social and should know how to navigate between applications, and to use drop-down menus or to drag and drop actions.

This guide is divided into the following 5 chapters:

Chapters | Description
--- | ---
Get Started with eXo Social | Introduction to eXo Social, resources and terms often used in eXo Social, how to manage accounts and edit your profile.
Work with Connections | How to work with connections, such as searching contacts, sending connection requests.
Work with Activities | Instructions of doing actions on the activities stream, including status and link updates, activities/comments, liking/disliking.
Work with Spaces | Basic actions in the Space application, such as creating a new space, joining or leaving the space, and more.
Work with Dashboard | Introductions to basic actions performed in the Dashboard workspace, such as adding gadgets or managing tabs in the Dashboard bar.

#### Resources

Information

- eXo Homepage

- eXo Wiki

Support

- Forums

- Support/Training/Consulting services

Download

- eXo Content

- eXo Development tools

- GateIn Portal Framework

- eXo Collaboration

- eXo Knowledge

- eXo Social

Resource Center

- Video demos, tutorials, webinar archives, features & benefits tables and more

## Get Started with eXo Social

### Glossary

To get started with eXo Social, it is more useful to learn about some terms often used when approaching eXo Social as below.

- User profile is an information page for each eXo Social user that includes information of account, avatar, contact, experiences.

- Connections is the page displaying information about relations among eXo Social users, including established connections, incoming and outgoing invitations.

- Connection request is the act of asking or expressing a connection desire that can be accepted, or denied by receivers. The requests also can be canceled by inviters.

- Space request is the act of asking the managers or creators of spaces to give permissions to join their spaces.

- Activity is an application where users can do many actions, such as publishing their own respective activity streams, showing recent activities or updates, new connections or updating status and more.

- Activity Stream is a set of recent activities, providing users with the ability to communicate in the stream of data. With this application, eXo Social allows users to organize and share information in the flow of data effectively.

- Space is a working environment where you can manage users and communities more conveniently. It enables you to regroup people by various interests or projects and to leverage any existing application, such as portlets or gadgets.

- Space manager is a user with special rights within a space. The manager can monitor the list of members, configuration and install applications. When any user creates a space, he/she automatically becomes the space's manager who can validate space subscription requests.

- Dashboard is one portlet hosting mini-applications known as gadgets. The dashboard shows data from various components which can be RSS feed, calendar, calculator, To-do and more.

- Space application is one application used in the Space application of eXo Social. One space can contain one or more applications which can be shared among users.

### Account

#### Register your account

As a guest, you can visit eXo Social but are limited to some content and applications. To access more content or perform some functionalities, you first need to register by yourself and contact the portal administrator to gain certain permissions.

1. Click Register on the top right corner of the eXo Social homepage.

2. Fill in the Register New Account form. The asterisk (*) mark indicates mandatory fields.

The mandatory fields which are marked with the asterisk (*) include:

Field | Description
--- | ---
User name | The name used to log in that must be unique with with its length from 3 to 30 characters. Only alpha, digit, and underscore characters are allowed.
Password | The authentication string between 6 and 30 characters, including spaces.
Confirm Password | Retype the password above. Values in both Password and Confirm Password fields must be identical.
First Name | The user's first name which must be between 1 and 45 characters.
Last Name | The user's last name which must be between 1 and 45 characters.
Email Address | The user's email that must be in the correct form, for example: username@abc.com.

3. Click next to the User Name field to check if the selected username is available or not.

4. Enter the validation text into the textbox.

5. Click Subscribe to accept adding your new account, or Reset to clear all entered values.

Your registration is unsuccessful if one of the error messages occurs, such as:

- User name is existing or User Name is invalid.

- Password has less than 6 characters.

- Password and Confirm Password are not the same.

- Email Address is in a invalid format.

- Required fields are blank (empty).

- Text verification isn't correct.

After creating your new account successfully, you should contact your administrator to ask for appropriate permissions for your account.

### Note

Be sure to enter your email address correctly. In case of forgetting your user name or password, you can recover it from this email address.

#### Sign in & Sign out

To sign in to eXo Social, do as follows:

1. Go to the eXo Social homepage by entering the appropriate URL into the address bar of your browser. For example: http://localhost:8080/socialdemo/.

2. Click the Sign in link at the top right of the page.

3. Input your registered user name and password in the Sign in form.

4. Select the Remember My Login checkbox for the first time if you want to automatically return to the eXo Social page without signing in again. This feature enables you to be automatically authenticated to avoid doing an explicit authentication when you access the eXo Social.

5. Click Sign in to submit the form, or Discard to quit.

### Note

In case the username does not exist or the username/password is invalid, you will be returned to the Sign In form with an alert message to sign in again. To attempt your login again, re-enter your username and password.

After signing in successfully, you will be redirected to the eXo Social homepage and welcomed with your full name on the top right corner of the page.

To end your authenticated session, simply hover your cursor over the eXo icon on the top left corner of the page and select Sign out from the drop-down menu.

### Note

From the eXo drop-down menu, you also can change language and skin of eXo Social by clicking each relevant icon.

#### Retrieve username/password

In case you forget your account or password, you can recover as follows:

1. Click the 'Forget your User Name/Password?' link beneath the Password field when singing in.

2. Select the appropriate option and click Next. You will be prompted to provide your identity, depending on your choice.

3. Enter your Username/Email in the form.

4. Click Send to submit your entered values.

After you submit the form, an email will be sent to your email address with the requested information.

If you forget your password, you will be sent a new password temporarily. Your original password will not be valid after this email is sent. You will be directed to a page to update your password for the next time you sign in.

### User profile

By default, your profile is just initialized with the basic account information entered in the Registration form. Therefore, if you only want to view or edit the basic information on account and password, simply hover your cursor over your display name on the top right corner of the page, and select My Account.

The Account Profiles form is displayed with information you have set previously.

Here, you can change your account information in the Account Profiles tab, except for Username. These changes will be automatically synchronized with details in the Basic information in your Profile and vice versa. Also, you can change your password by clicking the Change Password tab.

If you want to view and update more details, go to the My Profile page by following either of 3 ways:

The first way

Hover your cursor over your display name at the top right corner of the page, then select My Profile from the drop-down menu.

The second way

Go to the Activity Stream page first, then select the My Profile tab in the left pane.

The third way

Go to the My Connections page first, then select the My Profile tab in the left pane.

The My Profile page is displayed as below.

From here, you can:

- Edit your information, including basic information, contact details, and experiences.

- Upload your profile avatar.

- Update your current position.

#### Edit your information

Your own information is visible to all people using the network. You can change your information as follows:

1. Click Edit at the top of each corresponding section in the right pane of the My Profile page.

2. Change your desired information. In both Contact and Experience sections, click Add corresponding to one field you want to add more or Remove to delete your input information.

3. Click Save to accept all changes, or Cancel to close the Edit form without any changes.

The followings are changeable information in each pane.

Basic Information

Field | Description
--- | ---
First name | The first name which is required with the length from 1 to 45 characters.
Last name | The last name which is required with the length from 1 to 45 characters.
Email | The email address which must be in a valid format, for example, johnsmith@exoplatform.com. (See more details about the Email Address format here.)

Contact

Field | Description
--- | ---
Gender | The gender of user. Select your gender from the select box, either male or female.
Phone | The phone numbers at work, home or at other sites which must be from 3 to 20 numeric characters.
IMs | The nickname of either IM services that must be between 3 to 60 characters.
Urls | The website address which must be in the correct format, for example, http://exoplatform.com/.

Experience

Field | Description
--- | ---
Organization | Where you have worked. The field's length is limited from 3 to 90 characters.
Position | The job title which is limited from 3 to 90 characters.
Job Details | Brief description of your job without any character-related limitations.
Skills Used | Skills used without any limitations.
Start Date | The start date of your work.
End Date | The end date of your work.
Still in this position | Indicate that you are currently at the described position.

`See also`

- Upload your profile avatar

- Update your current position

#### Upload your profile avatar

You easily upload a photo to your profile or to the spaces which you have created or have the Manage permission.

1. Click the Change Picture link, or directly click your current avatar in the left pane to open the Upload an Image form.

2. Click Browse... to select an image from your local device.

3. Select your desired image, then click the Open button or double-click the image to upload it. The uploaded image must be smaller than 2 MB.

4. Click Confirm to open the Image Preview form to see some related information, such as file name, file type, and image size.

5. Click Save to accept your changes.

### Note

Your image will be automatically resized to a specified value.

#### Update your current position

1. Click the Edit link.

The form to update the current information will appear.

2. Enter your new position which is limited from 3 to 30 characters and click Save. Your current position will be immediately updated.

### Note

The information entered in the Position field will be retrieved when you do the Search function.

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