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. In addition to ease of use features and an award-winning UI, the product includes built-in content management, collaboration, social networking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Link to Liferay Portal from your desktop. Just drag your files into familiar "WebDAV" desktop folders and they are automatically uploaded to your portal.
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.
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.
Beyond managing existing content, Liferay CMS lets users easily create and manage everything from a simple article of text and images to full functional web sites. Web publishing works alongside Liferay Portal's larger collection of applications, which means that you can add in shopping cart functionality, visitor polls, web forms, community collaboration tools and more.
Everything is done with our collection of easy-to-use tools with familiar rich-text editors and intuitive interface.
Lufthansa Flight Training School published its employee portal with working employee store and shopping cart using Liferay CMS.
Liferay CMS provides one central place to aggregate and manage all your content. Each community within Liferay Portal gets its own separate Document Library and Image Gallery.
Both are equipped with customizable folders and act as a web-based shared drive for all your team members, no matter where they are. Because content is accessible only by those authorized by the administrator, each individual file is as open or as secure as you need it to be.
Liferay CMS features integration with Microsoft Office®, which means that when you update files and documents from your local drive, they can be automatically uploaded to your document repository online.
Liferay CMS makes use of publicly available SharePoint® protocols to allow users to open, save, version, lock, and share documents directly between Liferay and Microsoft Office®. This opens up new ways of integrating desktop workflow with web-based collaboration and document storage. For example, a marketing team working on a new product campaign can store Powerpoints, brochures, copy and graphics in a Liferay document library and brainstorm ideas using collaboration tools such as IM, Wiki, and Forums.
Instead of adding files one by one, users can upload multiple at a time to the document library, image gallery and any of the other tools that allow for document attachments.
In the Document Library, you can convert a file's format upon both upload and export (ie, a word document into a pdf).
If there are applications with valuable content that needs to be accessed, rest assured that our open SOA development strategy makes Liferay Portal one of the best technologies to use for application integration.
Liferay Portal can speak to your HR system, Accounting software or any other system to pull relevant information as you need it.
World Vision leveraged Liferay Portal’s open and flexible framework to pull in technology for dynamic mapping and Enterprise Content Management.
Users can search for relevant information throughout an entire portal, within a community, within specific portlets such as Wikis, Message Boards, among others, and even in external integrated applications.
Out of the box, there is the choice of using either Amazon's OpenSearch or SOLR. Other search engines can be integrated easily.
While Liferay Portal pulls together all your content, this tool allows you to publish any piece of content in your portal, either through a set of publishing rules or by manually selecting it.
For example, if you wanted to publish all content that has the tag "sales", you could set up an Asset Publisher portlet to do that. Any time a user posts anything with that tag, whether it be a document, an image, a 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 portlet.
As a site gets larger, users appreciate the convenience of automatically generated site maps that are dynamic enough to let users rearrange site pages with a simple drag and drop.
Users can Tag web content, documents, message board threads and more to dynamically share important or interesting content with other portal users.
Liferay saves content creators and publishers the trouble of having to configure each new page they create. This feature allows administrators to create and save page templates that define the elements (content, applications, portlets) that will live in a page and how they will be laid out.
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.
Liferay Portal allows users to easily create predefined and reusable structures, templates, and page layouts for content. Those with limited HTML and CSS skills will only need to enter text and upload images via rich text editors--their content is automatically styled based on the structure and templates they are using at the time.
Liferay Portal allows administrators to add special notes to web content structures and templates to instruct content authors and editors on how they should be used.
Liferay CMS automatically updates sitemap information and makes new pages instantaneously searcheable by major search engines.
Content creation and publishing in Liferay CMS is simple and straight forward. A rich text editor with spell check and text styling enables anyone to create content without knowing how to code as if they were editing a Word document. Those who do know how to code can edit in the same editor from a source code mode.
Organizations worldwide use Liferay Portal to publish full intranets, extranets, collaboration platforms and other workspaces to meet their functional needs.
Leveraging the system of communities and organizations, each department or team can have its own secured space equipped with a set of features and look and feel of its choosing. Each space has its own CMS and document library that can be supplemented by any of Liferay Portal's other collaboration or administrative tools and applications. They can even share documents and information between departments.
Read more about how AutoZone leveraged Liferay Portal for its employee intranet.
If you need to alter what you've created and published, you can do this live. Liferay CMS lets you edit and preview updates on a live site in real-time without affecting what the public sees until you're absolutely ready. You can do this with individual pages, entire communities, and full portals.
If you don't want to publish right away, you can tell Liferay Portal when to publish, what to publish and where to publish it to. It'll even let you revert back to older versions of your work.
After setting up a website, intranet or other Liferay creation, dynamic virtual hosting allows you to use this same installation of Liferay Portal to spin-off an infinite number of other portals, each with its own unique URL, look and feel and functionality.
For example, a music site can run infinite numbers of sub sites for various musicians. Each musician would get its own site (a mini portal) with a login for their fans, unique URL and theme.
All this is easily managed via the UI.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to frequently read RSS feeds from message boards and blogs within the portal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.