What's Liferay portal?

What's Liferay portal?

As the world's leading open source portal platform, Liferay portal provides a unified web interface to the data and tools scattered across many sources. Within Liferay portal, a portal interface is composed of a number of portlets—self-contained interactive elements that are written to a particular standard. As portlets are developed independent from the portal itself and are loosely coupled with the portal, they are, apparently, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Liferay portal has a wide range of portlets freely available for things such as blogs, calendar, Document Library, Image Gallery, mail, message boards, polls, RSS feeds, Wiki, web content, and so on. Liferay portal also ships with the Content Management System (CMS) and Web Content Management (WCM) solutions. Liferay CMS provides basic Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS) features. Liferay portal is the best ECMS for small team collaborations. Event data can be specific to a small group within a company. In any organization, some data will be relevant at a team level and other data that will be relevant across the whole business. Liferay portal supports such things very well.

As the world's leading open source enterprise portal solution, Liferay portal uses the latest Java, J2EE, and Web 2.0 technologies in order to deliver solutions for enterprises across both public and private sectors. Meanwhile, the built-in web content management and a content integration framework allow us to aggregate and publish existing repository content with new content. This helps create web sites and collaborative workspaces, for example, intranets, extranets, team sites, and so on. In addition, the built-in suite of social computing tools allows multiple forums, Wikis, blogs, and Document Libraries to be created and matched to specific user groups or knowledge areas within the same site.

Liferay currently has the following three main functionalities:
1. Liferay portal—JSR-168/JSR 286 enterprise portal platform.
2. Liferay CMS and WCM—JSR-170 content management system and web content management.
3. Liferay collaboration and social software—collaboration software such as blogs, calendar, web mail, message boards, polls, RSS feeds, Wiki, presence (AJAX chat client, dynamic friend list, activity wall, activity tracker), alert and announcement, and so on.

Generally speaking, a web site built by Liferay might consist of CMS and WCM,
a portal, and collaboration and social software.