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Liferay Portal
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Liferay Portal is an open source portal that helps organizations collaborate more efficiently by providing a consolidated view of disparate applications. It is used by large and small organizations all over the world. Liferay has an extensive list of features that compares with most commercial portals but without the high license fees.
 
Themes
 
Liferay provides a hot deployable theme architecture that allows you to change the look and feel of the portal without modifying Liferay's core code. Graphic designers can easily mock up new themes because all of our pages utilize DIVs and CSS standards.


Sub-Themes
 
Each portlet can be customized further from the theme's look and feel.  End-users can change colors, fonts, and links to their own tastes without dealing with stylesheets or complex code.

Personalization

Portlets can be rearranged to the unique preferences of a user or community.  Move things up and down and all around -- all by a simple drag-and-drop.  Portlets can also be added easily by a "Add Content" pop-up palette.

CMS

Liferay has its own built-in content management system to give your organization a flexible tool built on top of XSLT and Velocity technologies. This page you are reading is served by the CMS tool.  Read Liferay Journal to find out more.
 
SSO

Liferay provides a built in connector for CAS, Yale's single sign on engine. You can write custom hooks to integrate with other SSO engines like Netegrity.

Liferay can also synchronize its user list between the portal and an external data source like another database or LDAP server. A default connector for Microsoft Exchange is bundled with the portal.

ASP Model

Liferay was designed from the ground up to be used by application service providers. This means you can host multiple instances of the portal (distinguished by unique URLs) on one application server and database.
 
Application Server Agnostic

Unlike portals that come from application server vendors, Liferay is designed to be application server agnostic so you are not locked into a specific server. Liferay will work on lightweight servlet containers like Jetty and Tomcat, or on J2EE compliant servers like Borland ES, JBoss+Jetty/Tomcat, JOnAS+Jetty/Tomcat, JRun, OracleAS, Orion, Pramati, RexIP, Sun JSAS, WebLogic, and WebSphere.

An added bonus of being a Java portal means Liferay will work on many operating systems: BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), Linux (Fedora, Novell), Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Spring, EJB, and AOP

Liferay's business beans are built on top of Spring. This allows you to leverage Spring's AOP, IOC, and proxy features to customize Liferay.

We use Spring to decide whether to call the POJO (Plain Old Java Object) implementation of a business bean or the EJB wrapped implementation of a business bean. This allows deployers to decide whether to deploy Liferay on a heavyweight application server like Borland ES (and thus leverage VisiBroker's transaction features) or a lightweight container like Tomcat.

Database Agnostic

Liferay uses Hibernate as the ORM tool for the persistence layer which enables pluggable databases (DB2, Firebird, Hypersonic, InterBase, JDataStore, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SAP, and SQL Server). This allows your organization to leverage existing resources without having to purchase new database hardware and software.
 
Internationalization
 
Liferay can display and receive input in multiple languages. Language resources for Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese are already included.
 
Portlets, CMS content, and page layouts can all be easily localized to the languages you want to support.  You can add the Language portlet to any page and allow the end-user to quickly select a different localization on the fly.

Scalable N-Tier Cluster

Liferay is very scalable and uses OSCache to provide deployers with a clustered cache. You can scale by adding more nodes without sacrificing on caching.

You can cluster the enterprise release of Liferay in multiple tiers: presentation tier, business logic tier, and database tier to meet your specific load requirements.

Struts and Tiles

Liferay leverages off of Struts to follow the MVC pattern. Most programmers are already familiar with Struts, which means your developers will have an easier time of writing portlets in a familiar framework.

The look and feel of the portal can be easily customized and reskinned because the display logic is concentrated in a few template files read by Tiles.
 
Out of the Box Portlets

Liferay provides over fifty (50) useful portlets: Blogs, Shopping, Message Boards, Wiki, Mail, Journal (CMS), Polls, RSS, etc.  Most portlets can be restricted for different users with its fine-grained permissioning.

Portals are only useful so long as there are portlets that provide functionality. Our bundled portlets are a great starting point for a portal deployment. They also serve as a large code base of examples from which you can glean patterns for writing your own portlets.


Administration

Liferay allows administrators to easily manage users, organizations, locations, and roles through a GUI interface. Organizations and locations signify a collection of users. Roles signify permissions that a group or user can be bound to. Access to portlets are also restricted to users based on roles.

Administrators can also specify community pages so that all users who belong to a certain group see the same page.
 
Community Based Portlets

Many of the bundled portlets are community aware. For example, if you add an event to your HR community calendar, then Marketing would not be aware of it.