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Open Source Apps: Build Enterprise Class Portal with Liferay

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Solutions that help enterprises in web publishing, content management and collaboration across various departments are in demand today. Social networking tools like wikis and blogs are being deployed by organizations that contain information about company policies, procedures and various other documentations. To achieve all these tasks, they deploy specific tools for each of these functions; for example, a CMS tool for content management and Wordpress as a blogging solution. But over time, it becomes a challenge to manage those multiple solutions and also, as most of the organization functions are related to each other, these tools seldom integrate with each other. Liferay lets you do all this.

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About Liferay Portal

Liferay Potal is an Open Source enterprise portal framework that offers content management, web publishing, forums, collaboration workspace and social networking tools, all under one roof. It is a good fit for mid-size organizations that are looking for alternatives to expensive proprietary solutions. Liferay Portal has multiple features that give users an intuitive and collaborative experience, and allows them to publish, organize and access all their data and applications through a single point of access.

Liferay Portal is based on J2EE platform and can run on any operating system having JRE. It is compatible with all leading databases and can be deployed on any leading application server. The portal supports JSR 168 and JSR 286 standards for portlet development, which allow organizations to integrate their other sub-systems based on Java, Spring, Struts, AJAX or any other Java based framework with the Liferay Portal.

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Features

The highlight feature of Liferay is the in-built web content management system, which features a one-click page creation for web publishing. It has a user-defined workflow system for role based authorization and has document management integrated with Microsoft Office.. Liferay's portal architecture is based on organization-centric structure comprising of users, organizations, communities or departments, etc. This architecture truly defines the social collaboration feature of Liferay, due to which departments and user-defined groups can collaborate in real-time. The other features include real-time user and group activity tracking and RSS-enabled Wikis, blogs and forums. The built-in mail client, calendar, address book and contact management gives a familiar look and feel of office tools to the users. The OpenSocial support lets you use Google gadgets to run natively in Liferay.

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Liferay is available in two editions; Community and Enterprise. The Community edition is available for free download and is bundled separately for different application servers. In Enterprise edition, which is paid, you can avail the full support, training and Liferay Developer Studio for building portlet applications for integration with other enterprise services. For administrators, Liferay has helpful dashboards through which they can monitor portal performance, user activity tracking and management of users and communities.

Getting Started

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With this month's DVD, we are distributing Liferay Portal 6 Community Edition, which is bundled with Tomcat application server. The installation is straightforward. You just have to extract the Portal pack into a directory and your Liferay is ready to roll. The default installation comes with HSQL database, but you can integrate it with other databases. Working on these default setup; go to the installed directory and browse to Tomcat folder and from under bin folder select startup.bat, if you are on Windows platform. In the following steps we will go through how web content can be published and other features of Liferay.







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