Liferay Portal

Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition 5.2 is now available, boosting the speed and feature-set found in the previously released Standard Edition, including benchmarked performance improvements. The Enterprise Version Catches UpLiferay Portal Enterprise Edition was launched back in January 2009 to complement the existing free Standard Edition. Version 5.2 of the Standard Edition was launched back in February to the open source community, offering content management, collaboration tools, mashups and social networking applications in a single package.

Liferay, Inc., announced the version 5.2 release of Liferay Portal Standard Edition — an open source portal platform that integrates content management, collaboration and social networking. The latest release promises enhanced performance, scalability and simplified administration. Liferay now offers a value-added commercial Enterprise Edition (EE) in addition to the open source Standard Edition (SE).

Open source enterprise portal vendor Liferay has announced a new collaboration product called Social Office. Liferay positions the software as a budget alternative to Microsoft's Sharepoint. Social Office supports Sharepoint's protocols, so that documents can be opened, saved, locked and edited in MS Office.

The final release of the updated portlet specification, JSR 286, which came out earlier this month, marked the end of a long process for the important (Java) portal standard.As a follow-up to the widely-adopted JSR 168, this portlet specification 2.0 moves to make portals more like integrated apps and less like collections of disconnected windows. Specifically it adds support for events, public render parameters, resource serving, and a portlet filter.Some vendors like eXo, IBM, JBoss and Liferay have already been supporting earlier iterations of the standard and two years ago, I commented that most commercial portal vendors are behind this new portlet standard. While this is still the case, many significant changes have happened in the marketplace since the initial draft of JSR 286 in August 2006.

Although the hype around enterprise portals seems to have subsided, I believe genuine interest remains high. Yesterday at the annual AIIM Expo, we held an "Enterprise Portal Smackdown," where a packed room of document and records managers keenly watched 7-minute demos presented by different consultancies (Ironworks, Molecular, and Liferay) demonstrating, respectively: BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and Liferay Portal. Here's a very brief summary of the demos: Liferay: "We're cool" Molecular/IBM: "Beware...portals are complicated" IronWorks/BEA: "E-business dashboards rock"More enterprises are recognizing use-cases for accessing content repositories and services from other applications. Obviously, portal platforms represent one option here, although panelists discussing "convergence" the day before seemed a bit more sanguine about enterprise search in this regard

Last week saw the release of version 4 of the open source Liferay portal. This major new release introduces improved security, enterprise taxonomy, velocity template support, JSR-170 compliance, theme (a.k.a. skin) enhancements, and more documentation. As Enterprise Portal Report readers know, Liferay is comparatively weaker in clustering, personalization, and WebDAV support. Unfortunately these areas were not addressed by the new release.

In a bold move Sun used the JavaOne conference earlier this month to announce that it will begin to work closely together with Liferay on next-generation web technologies. It took me a couple of weeks to digest the news and distill what the press release did not spell out. Really what will happen is that Sun will take a snapshot of the Liferay Portal code and use this to create a Sun-branded portal with added functionality. An initial version is expected in late 2008 or early 2009.This is pretty big news because Sun already has a portal offering, which now will go away. The current release of Sun Portal is 7.2 and customers should not expect a Sun Portal Server 8. Sun says it will provide some level of migration tool for existing Sun Portal customers with the initial release and more will come down the road (e.g., by a 1.1 or 1.2 release).

Today we announced the 3rd edition of our Enterprise Portals Report. Lots of interesting new tid-bits to report about MOSS 2007, Liferay, and other portal products. But the big story this season revolves around BEA and Oracle, both of whom now sell two portal products, leaving their customers with some difficult choices going forward. Our release about the latest version of the report shares more details.