Andrey Yasinetskiy@Software Development

At the previous post I wrote about Portal technology and JSR-168. I listed the most famous portal platforms at the end of post.
So, lets start from overview of these Portal platforms and their main features and benefits.

Liferay Portal (http://www.liferay.com)

Liferay Portal is one of the most mature portal frameworks on the market (in development since 2000) and offers these basic benefits:

• Personalization
  Different people with the same role work differently
• Customization
  Different roles require different information
• Workflow
  Efficiency - people get directly to the information and applications they need. Customization ensures they don’t miss anything

These are the mature features:

• Provides a plug-in framework to install Liferay components
• Sitemaps Protocol support
• Microformat support
• ICEfaces Integration for AJAX + JSF
• Javascript Client Libraries for JSON Web Services
• PHP and Ruby Support
• Enterprise Password Policy Management
• OpenID enabled
• Database tuning
• Scalability - optimize memory usage
• Integration with Microsoft Exchange
• Yahoo Maps
• Full WebDAV Support
• Eclipse Portlet development/deployment
• Role-base Theme management
• Standardize on jQuery JavaScript Framework
• Mobile device support

Full list of supported features you can find here.

These are an “after-installation” functionality provided by included Portlets:

• Enterprise admin
  Allows users (with permissions) to manage users, organizations, locations, user groups, and roles, and to set their permissions.
• Page settings
  Liferay also has a Page Settings configuration area that can be used to change look and feel with one click, manage portal pages, insert Javascript and meta-data, and set friendly URLs.
• Document library
  Provides document management backed by the Jackrabbit JSR-170 compliant Java content repository. Includes check in / check out, meta data, and versioning.
• Journal
  Main interface for Liferay’s integrated web publishing system. Allows users to create, edit, and publish articles, as well as article templates for one click changes in layout. Journal has built in workflow, article versioning, search, and meta-data.
• Navigation
  Provides a directory of links reflecting the portal’s page structure, with drill down into the current page. Style and appearance can be adjusted. Unlike the Breadcrumb Portlet, the Navigation Portlet displays links for other pages outside of the current page’s trail of “parent” pages.
• Site Map
• Blogs
• Calendar
• Enterprise Instant Messaging
  An AJAX Enterprise Instant Messaging client that allows users to automatically chat over Jabber protocol with other logged-in portal users. Chat sessions are persisted across portal pages and as secure as other portal functionality.
• Mail
  An AJAX webmail client that can be configured to work with any mail server. Liferay Mail displays message lists and message previews in a dual pane window to reduce page refreshes. Messages can be searched or sorted by different criteria to find messages quickly. Drag and drop makes it easy to organize and delete messages.
• Wiki
• Bookmarks
• Communities
• Polls
• Google Portlets (Google Search Portlet, Google AdSense, Google Gadget for publishing Google’s widgets to Liferay Portal, Google Maps Portlet to facilitate mashup creation and show customized driving directions and locations.)
• News and RSS
• Weather
• Shopping
• Prototype Portlets
  Several Prototype Portlets ship with Liferay to provide examples of how to incorporate other technologies with Liferay at the presentation layer. These include Flash, Laszlo, Velocity, JSP, Struts, IFrames, and Web Proxy.

After installation you get almost completed portal with basic functionality. All you need is just customize look-and-fill and may be develop your special features.