Liferay is the leading provider of open source software in realising business collaboration solutions for small and medium-scale companies. With their key product Liferay Portal and other complementary products, Liferay offers a competitive alternative to powerful software products of global players.
The purpose is not only to function – the solution should function as you require. The awarded Liferay portal stands out with the right combination of convenient functionality, user-friendliness and technical innovation. Besides the simple use of functions and an awarded user interface, the product offers content management, the opportunity to cooperate and a social network.
With all your daily tasks and responsibilities, you don't want to go through the pains of learning and adapting to another new solution.
Liferay Portal not only simplifies your work experience - it caters to your preferences and needs. With an eleven-year history of innovation, Liferay Portal offers an award-winning UI, multiple layers of personalization and desktop conventions that make for unbeatable ease of use and quick adoption.
Each Liferay Portal user is given a set of personal pages that are easy to customize to specific tastes, preferences, and needs.
You can change how your pages look, what tools and applications are included, what goes into your personal document library, and who can have access to it. You can also pull in your personal email and existing calendar events.
Liferay Portal's impressive ease-of-use has been integral to the product's popularity.
With just a few clicks, you can make changes to the look and feel, portlet configurations, themes, and page layouts. With a simple drag-and-drop, you can add and reposition applications, tools and other elements to the portal.
It offers one of the best user interfaces in the portal market and continues to introduce new innovations to make your life even easier.
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.
Liferay gives you the highest return on investment (ROI) at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).
We understand the impact that usability, interoperability, and open standards can have on an organization's processes and have designed Liferay Portal accordingly. The cost savings we offer is only secondary in importance to the value that our technology brings.
Compatibility with all major operating systems, application servers, and databases means that you can download, install and try Liferay Portal in your existing IT environment, with your existing IT staff.
When you choose Liferay Portal your organization benefits from an exceptionally low total cost of ownership.
While other portals make you pay for additional features, Liferay Portal comes with over 60 tools, over 20 themes, and a number of developer tools. We provide you with as many resources as possible to accomplish whatever it is that you want to do (web publishing, collaboration, social networking, administration, etc.) at no additional cost.
Moreover, as Liferay Portal is the only enterprise portal leader on the market with no software or hardware agenda, you are not bound to using a particular IT stack and invest in only what you need for the life of your portal project.
Liferay Portal is offered under an open source license (for the Community Edition) as well as a business-friendly commercial license with a Liferay Portal Enterprise Subscription.
Liferay Portal uses industry standard, government-grade encryption technologies, so you can always be confident in the security of your data. Log in once to access all your files. Varying layers of security with customized access to sensitive information also lets you control who sees what.
From investment banks to the Department of Defense and other government agencies, Liferay Portal is a trusted solution that keeps confidential information safe.
Liferay Portal is an investment that evolves with your organization. If you require new functionality, tools can be added with just a few clicks: A company intranet built on Liferay Portal can, for example, be easily evolved into an extranet that reaches outside partners. An organization powering a website with Liferay Portal can easily add social features to capitalize on the power of its online community.
Liferay Portal promises business security and long term viability that surpasses that of the competition.
While commercial products can dissolve and change at the whim of investors or high level business decisions, open source products thrive as long as there is a community surrounding it.
Liferay Portal is in its eleventh year of development and has an active, international community that continues to develop and push the product forward. The community also reassures you that Liferay Portal will not stay stagnant but will continue to evolve with ideas and contributions that speak to the needs of a diverse audience of both business and technical users.
Moreover, unlike many open source projects, Liferay Portal is backed by a stable and profitable global company with year-on-year revenue growth and a roster of talented developers that are fully dedicated to the product's ongoing development and innovation.
If you need help with your portal solution, support, consulting and training are provided by this same core team that work on the product day in and day out.
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.
Liferay includes a unified document repository that houses documents, video, audio, images, and other media types from one place. It can be leveraged across an enterprise, within a specific group, or for a single individual as a web repository. Enterprise-wide repositories 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. Our Media Gallery provides a clean and attractive display to find and browse all images, video, and other media assets.
Liferay's portal and community aspects allow individual document libraries to be available to each site or domain defined within the portal. Individuals also benefit from their own content repository where they can store assets in the cloud.
Not only does Liferay provide out-of-the-box Document Management, you can also choose to mount multiple other content repositories (e.g. Liferay, Alfresco, Documentum) to Liferay while maintaining a common UI.
Administrators can create their own custom metadata sets and document types into language familiar to users. For example, financial reports, surveillance videos, and so on can be defined in a way that makes sense for the business functions of the content (e.g., author, reporting period, etc.).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Liferay currently supports international localization and includes out-of-the-box support for 30+ languages. Users can toggle between different language settings with just one click. Additional languages can be easily added.
Site administrators can designate portions of a page to be customized by a user, combining the flexibility of a user's workspace with the benefits of administrator control. Each user can then customize and personalize portions of community sites to their preferences.
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.
Users can create Sites with sets of predefined pages configured to their needs. These site templates can be dynamic, allowing all changes to the parent template to be inherited by associated children sites.
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.
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.
Liferay allows multiple teams to work on several variations of a site simultaneously and schedule publication dates for each. For example, three different teams can work on Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas and schedule their variation to publish at different times.
Enhanced staging includes automatic versioning with history, undo support at the site and page level, and preview based on scheduled publications.
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).
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.
Liferay provides users an efficient way to instantly refine search results by drilling down with specific constraints that match the user's search criteria. For example, a retail site built on Liferay would allow you to search for merchandise by inputting various combinations of criteria, such as color, size and price.
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.
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.
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.
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).