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A solution shouldn’t just work—it should work for you. The award-winning Liferay Portal sets itself apart with just the right balance of practical functionality, usability, and technical innovation.
Simplified UI Development
Liferay Portal simplifies the development of internal, external, and channel websites—notably those that allow users to login for personalized services or views and those that require a workflow approval process to update content and integrate or aggregate multiple existing services. Liferay Portal provides a single presentation layer for integrating all enterprise systems into a single easy to use interface for end users.
Flexible Enterprise Integration Framework
Liferay Portal is a central presentation layer platform that allows users, administrators and developers to integrate content and services from backend or legacy applications. Liferay supports multiple methods to integrate, including SOAP, REST, RSS, as well as proprietary API’s.
Out-of-the-box Tools
Liferay Portal provides more out of the box portlets than any other portal on the market—Choose from over 60 to customize your work environment. Included are Liferay CMS and Liferay Collaboration offering web publishing, content management, collaboration and social networking.
Secure Single Sign On (SSO)
Aggregate and access your content and applications in one place. Liferay Portal can pull all of your different systems together and make them available by logging in just once via the secure SSO.
Custom Fields
Administrators can customize, edit, add, and change user attributes (name, company, date, or any other information that needs to be tracked or logged by your system) directly from Liferay, without needing to modify their database.
Liferay 6 extends this support to Pages, Web Content, Blogs Entries, Documents and its folders, images and its folders, bookmarks and its folders, forum messages, calendar events and wiki pages.
Liferay also offers a framework so that developers can leverage this functionality in their custom portlets to support custom fields for their own entities.
Rules Engine Integration
Advanced personalization via Drools allows for «contextual personalization», the specification of content, functionality, and features based on a user’s location, activities, and their other self-defined profile attributes.
Communities & Organizations
Liferay users can be intuitively grouped into a hierarchy of «organizations» or cross-organizational «communities,» providing flexibility and ease of administration.
For example, members of different geographies such as Americas and EMEA can be grouped into organizations, whereas disciplines such as sales, marketing, and engineering that cross geographies can be created as communities. Each such group can also be given a separate mini portal with its own set of pages, content management system, shared calendar, and authorizations. A user can belong to multiple groups and easily navigate between them.
Multi-language Support
International or multi-lingual organizations get out of the box support for 30+ languages. Users can toggle between different language settings with just one click. You can also easily add other languages.
Search & Tagging
Tag web content, documents, message board threads and more to dynamically share important or interesting content with other portal users.
Users can then search for relevant information within specific portlets, communities, within the entire portal and even within external integrated applications.
User Personalization
Depending on what an administrator allows, users can personalize portal pages by adding, removing, positioning content or portlet attributes (e.g., zip code for weather portlet). These pages can be made public (published as a website with a unique friendly URL) or kept private.
Role Based Content Delivery
Portals allow multiple user types to access a single URL and access a unique page view depending on the users role, group, organization or personal preferences. Administrator controlled and user customized, Liferay Portal provides a central platform for determining enterprise content policy, including who can edit and publish content, files, communities, files and applications.
Single-Click Configuration
A fast, responsive interface makes Liferay Portal extremely easy and enjoyable to use for everyone in your organization. Typically time-consuming tasks such as altering a page layout, adding new applications and content, and changing look and feel can all be done in a couple of clicks without ever refreshing the page.
Dynamic Drag & Drop
Liferay Portal was the first portal to offer this feature, allowing users to move different elements around in the portal by simply dragging and dropping them into place.
Workflow Framework
Liferay Portal allows you to incorporate workflow into any of your own custom portlets by leveraging Liferay’s workflow APIs. This provides a better end user experience; saves your development team a lot of effort by reusing Liferay’s workflow administration tools; and provides seamless integration with all supported workflow engines.
User-Driven Workflow & Approval
Not only is there embedded workflow for content, Liferay Portal allows users to create their own workflow and define the number of approval paths based on their own unique business requirements and operational needs.
For example, administrators can now implement an approval process for new document uploads before they appear in the Document Library.
Auditing & Performance Monitoring
To help administrators monitor the portal’s performance and better optimize resources, Liferay Portal gives administrators access to key performance statistics (hits/page, avg time/hit, max time per request, and more) for all portlets and portal pages. Meanwhile, our Portal Auditing feature allows administrators to track and manage user activity within the portal.
Work From Your Desktop
Link to Liferay Portal from your desktop. Just drag your files into familiar «WebDAV» desktop folders and they are automatically uploaded to your portal.
Content Management Features
Don’t just store your content away—manage, integrate and publish it. Let your information take the form of a public website, a shared workspace or an enterprise content repository.
Web Publishing
As part of its suite of services, Liferay includes a complete web content management system that enables users to quickly build rich web content using many of the same features as extensive content management systems. Content in this sense means a website, web pages, or portions of a web page. Sophisticated features allow users to use predefined templates, schedule when content is published or removed, and determine how others should review content before being published.
Combined with the modular development aspects of a web portal, Liferay allows users to build powerful web pages by combining web content alongside web application portlets, widgets, or gadgets and assigning which pages are accessible or searchable by specific users.
Lufthansa Flight Training School developed an extensive employee portal, including a sophisticated employee store and shopping cart application implemented alongside standard content, using the Liferay web publishing capability.
Document Library & Image Gallery
Liferay includes a full document and image repository that can be leveraged across an enterprise, within a specific group, or for a single individual as a web repository. Enterprise-wide document and image libraries allow groups to store assets, tag them with key words, lock them, search for and leverage them in web pages, or download them for use offline.
Liferay’s portal and community aspects allow individual document libraries to be available to each community or domain defined within the portal. Individuals also benefit from their own document and image library where they can store assets in the cloud.
Asset Publisher
A powerful feature of Liferay Portal is a new portlet called Asset Publisher. This portlet can be added to any web page and configured to display any data contained within the portal based on any combination of criteria, including date published, author, tags, or content type. As new data is added into the portal, the Asset Publisher will find and display the data.
For example, you can setup Asset Publisher to display all content with the tag «sales lead.» Whenever content is tagged with «sales lead,» whether it is a document, image, blog entry, Wiki page, a message board posting, or a Bookmark to Liferay’s home page, that asset would get published in the Asset Publisher. Multiple Asset Publisher portlets can be configured and added to pages.
Workspace Publishing
Enterprise web architectures often include many different web properties, including customer websites, intranets, collaboration platforms, and numerous departmental and group websites. Liferay provides the ability to create workspaces for each within a single platform.
Each space is easily provisioned using the administration UI. It is also given a unique web content repository and document library, in addition to unique collaboration and administration tools. This allows a powerful method to unify the web domains within a single enterprise, allowing common training, common templates, a common user repository, and a common governance and auditing.
Easy Rich Text Editors
Users can quickly build content within Liferay’s Web UI interface without ever having to use external tools. Spell check and text styling are included, enabling anyone to create content without requiring coding knowledge or the need to use other complex tools. Users can also leverage the leading external web design tools.
Web Content Structures and Templates
Liferay Portal allows users to easily create reusable templates for web pages and page sections. This enables users to quickly build pages and allows websites to maintain a common look and feel across the entire site by allowing new pages to be created with an approved set of templates. Users can quickly create templates within Liferay’s web UI or by using external web development tools.
Template/Structure Comments
Liferay Portal allows administrators to add instructional comments and notes into templates, which can then be used to provide information on how each template should be used. This improves productivity between web page designers and content creators and editors.
Integration with Microsoft Office®
Document storage within Liferay is integrated to take advantage of SharePoint® protocols so users can work with Microsoft Office® files located on their local drive and automatically upload them onto the cloud in a Liferay document repository. Since all assets published in Liferay can also require workflow approvals (leveraging Liferay’s workflow), users can lock, open, edit, and save a document that is then published into a workflow for approval before being made available to share with others.
For example, a marketing team working on a new product campaign can store Powerpoint files, Word documents, spreadsheets, and graphics in a Liferay document library tagging each with a keyword and assigning a workflow approval process. Users can subscribe to alerts on document changes, be notified of changes needing review, and comment using forums, Wikis, and comment fields.
One-Click Page Creation
Web structures and templates allow common web layouts to be predefined and saved for future web pages. With One-Click Page Creation, users can create a new page and immediately begin adding content to the page layout, allowing web pages to be setup within minutes without any developer support required.
User-Driven Workflow & Approval
A team of individuals often manages the web content of a portal where some are allowed to create and edit content, while others must review and approve the content before it can be published to the live site. Liferay includes a full workflow engine (that can also be easily switched with an external 3rd party engine), which can be used to coordinate how content is reviewed and published.
In addition, Liferay allows other types of data to require an approval process. Documents, Wiki posts, blogs, etc. can also be required to go through a workflow. Using Liferay’s workflow for other types of documents creates a powerful team collaboration platform.
Live Page Editing and Scheduling
Pages from a live site can be edited and previewed without affecting what is seen on the public site, then scheduled for future publishing all within the online editor. Users can use this same method to edit individual pages, entire communities, or full portals. Liferay also allows users to «roll-back» to previous versions of pages, sites, or communities.
Document Conversion and Multi-File Uploads
Liferay provides many features to simplify how users interact on the web. For example, when uploading to the image or document library, instead of adding files one by one, users can select multiple files and upload them with a single click.
Additionally, users can upload and store a document in one file format, but make it available to download in other formats (i.e., a document uploaded as a .doc file can be available for download as a .pdf with Liferay providing the conversion at download time).
Drag-and-Drop Site Maps
Liferay automatically generates a hierarchical site map for the entire portal. These can be used by end users to quickly navigate to specific pages, but can also be used by administrators to manage the list of web pages contained in the portal. Implemented with drag-and-drop, site maps will allow administrators to quickly rearrange pages within the site.
Multi-Tier Search
A portal with web content, documents, images, wikis, blogs, and other user created content becomes a massive repository of data. Search becomes a vital aspect for users of the system since it is essential that users can find the content they need when they want it.
Liferay’s search allows users to search across all assets within the portal to which they currently have access, while also restricting them from assets in which they do not. This multi-tier search capability ensures that users have access to only open content or content available to them based on their roles and membership in various communities.
Out of the box, administrators can choose to use either Amazon OpenSearch or SOLR, though other search engines can also be implemented.
Dynamic Tagging
Search can be used to look inside content published within the portal, but occasionally it is not enough to help users find their desired content. Dynamic Tagging is available in Liferay, allowing content creators to define keywords associated with their content. Users can add keyword tags to web content, documents, message boards, and to more simplifying search and enabling powerful features like the Asset Publisher.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
With its ability to easily create web content, blogs, wikis and to share documents, Liferay Portal allows a website to become a valuable repository of information. While Liferay’s internal search can be used to find data within the portal, Liferay also optimizes updates to the site map information and makes new pages instantaneously searchable by external search engines.
Easy Integration
Web content viewed within a portal can be manually created or it may come from external sources integrated with Liferay Portal. As a web platform, Liferay provides multiple methods to integrate to external content and data. Liferay can be leveraged in a sophisticated Service Oriented Architecture as well as used for simple integrations via REST or RSS subscriptions.
World Vision leveraged Liferay Portal’s open and flexible framework to integrate dynamic map data with web content.
Dynamic Virtual Hosting and Vanity URL
A single portal can be duplicated over and over again to quickly create hosted websites within one Liferay deployment. Each clone can have its own unique URL, custom theme, and design. For example, a single deployment could host www.companyA.com and www.companyB.com with completely different themes, pages, and applications.
Additionally, all pages within a portal can be easily given a vanity URL (i.e., you can easily setup new pages and define their URL as www.companyA.com/documents or www.companyA.com/training).
Collaboration and Social Features
You have content and resources at your fingertips. Now what? Liferay takes you to the next step and enables productive discussion around all your collective knowledge.
KnowledgeBase
KnowledgeBase leverages collaboration functionality to provide a happy medium between centralized and distributed content creation; it is more structured than a wiki, but less formal than using a work-flow involved content management system.
While the articles themselves are meant to be provided by an administrator or site manager, end users can vote on whether these articles are helpful and make comments to them.
Wikis
Build up and document important or interesting information as a community with Liferay’s Wiki, which competes with standalone products in the robustness of feature set.
Each community gets its own Wiki with its own set of authorizations. Anyone with editing rights can quickly contribute information to these online topical encyclopedias.
Message Boards
Message Boards are a perfect solution for facilitating conversations around shared ideas within a department or project team, or for capturing and sharing the tacit knowledge of the workgroup.
Liferay offers views of message board activity statistics and recent posts and users can both subscribe to threads via RSS and reply to threads by email. Like all other portlets, Message Boards are secured by Liferay’s granular system of authorizations which grants varying levels of control to different users.
- Collabnet, the creators of SourceForge, used Liferay’s Message Boards to build its Discussion Services functionality, part of CollabNet Enterprise Edition.
Blogs
Liferay’s Blogs provide the best features of modern blogging tools coupled with the benefits of the community-centric nature of Liferay Portal. They allow users to convey information and facilitate conversations around blogs directly in the context of a website, intranet, extranet, or social network.
Features include a user-friendly rich text editor, social bookmarking links, email notifications of blog replies, and an entry rating system. All blogs can be subscribed to via RSS and users can schedule entries to be published at specific times and dates.
Abuse Reporting
Liferay Portal offers an «Abuse Reporting» framework that allows community members and users to flag inappropriate content in our message boards, blogs, and any page within the portal. Developers can also leverage the associated framework for use in their own custom-developed applications.
RSS
Subscribe to frequently read RSS feeds from message boards and blogs within the portal.
Polls
Multiple choice polls can be created with this tool that also keeps track of votes. Many separate polls can be managed and a separate portlet can be configured to display a specific poll’s results.
Activity Tracking
Keep tabs on the most recent activity on Liferay Blogs, Message Boards, Wiki and other tools. This information is displayed in «Recent Activity» portlets and on a Facebook-like Activity Wall.
- See how Liferay is using Activity Tracking to serve its active open source community.
Instant Message
A friends list automatically displays the names of all other logged-in portal users. If you have something to say, just IM them. You also get familiar chat features like profile pictures and customized away messages. For your convenience, chat boxes stay at the bottom of your screen and follow you as you navigate through the portal while conversations remain secure behind your organization’s firewall.
If you need to send an email, do it directly through the portal. A full AJAX-based webmail client with a sleek, user-friendly interface can be configured to interface with many popular IMAP email servers.
Shared Calendar
Community-based calendars that allow users to create, manage, search for events. Events can be shared across communities, and event reminders can be set up to alert users of upcoming events by email, IM, or SMS. Microformats and Calendaring support allow you to transfer calendar and user information via Web 2.0 standards.
Announcements & Alerts
Broadcast messages to different group of users whether they are simple announcements or «newsletter»-like in purpose.
Each user can control how they receive alerts: via portal-based web alert, SMS, Email or any additional delivery mechanisms configured by the portal administrator.
Social Equity
Social Equity is a brand new feature in Liferay version 6. It promotes the development of a dynamic social capital system by measuring the contribution and participation of a user and the information value of an asset. A person can gain equity by performing certain activities within communities, such as adding contributions (e.g., wikis, blogs), rating or commenting, and viewing content.