Besides the basic benefits mentioned above, Liferay portal provides a number of the key business benefits, some of which are have been discussed in the following sections:
A rich, friendly, intu itive, and collabor ative end user experience
A good user experience is regarded as a key to capture the highest return on an enterprise portal investment. Liferay portal maximizes the productivity gains of portal users and provides a rich, friendly, intuitive, and collaborative end-user experience.
- Intuitive—users can drag-and-drop portlets to customize the experience to the unique preferences of a user or community.
- Rich—users can use one of the theme plugins from both the out of the box and the community to change the look and feel of the portal without dealing with complex code. There are more than 60 theme plugins available in the community.
- Friendly—community members can have their pages with a user-defined friendly URL. This gives the users a better sense of ownership over the technology. Thus, it enhances the user experience, and moreover, generates users' loyalty.
- Collaborative—users can create true communities of users via collaborative tools such as instant messaging, message boards, blogs, Wikis, and so on.
A single point of access to all infor mation
As we know, it will become very annoying to collaborate across business units or among distinct business entities if the end users have to stop and log into the applications every single time. Fortunately, Liferay portal provides users a single point of access to all organization's data, content, web content, and other information from existing in-house applications (that is, HR, CRM) as well as external sources (for example Alfresco, FatWire, Magnolia, and Vignette). That is, in a web site, users can access all organization's data, content, web content, and other information via a single point of access.
By integration with LDAP, information about users and groups are managed in a centralized server. Liferay portal, portlets, and others applications can share the same users' and groups' information directly.
By integration with SSO, users need to log in once to access all their information needs. For example, after the users have logged in once in the Liferay portal, they can automatically log in the portlets such as Alfresco client, Alfresco content, and other systems.
Moreover, the fine-grained permissioning allows the users to customize and control the user access to sensitive information and functionality. Users get an intuitive frontend, whereas behind the scenes, Liferay portal supports Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) such as Service-Mix and Mule technologies. Thus, it simplifies the integration, upgrade, and substitution of disparate applications for the developers.
In addition, Control Panel provides centralized administration for all content, users, organizations, communities, roles, server resources, and more. It has full customizability with the ability to hide different parts of the form as desired, or add custom ones with portlets.
Especially, as a social collaboration solution for the enterprise, My Social Office provides full virtual workspace, streamlines communication, saves time, builds group cohesion, and raises productivity. With My Social Office, all you have to do is log in and work the way you want at your own convenience.
