Anyone that has researched Open Source Portal Servers will recognize tonights post on Liferay Portal Server.

About 2 years ago our company started researching Portal Software and at first we found that most of it was very expensive and not very friendly to work with.  We were trying to find a portal server to develop our business idea… which later became know as OfficeGateway.

We had an idea to build an online collaboration tool for Small and Medium sized businesses.  A place for shared calendars… document sharing… CRM… etc.  As mentioned above we spent sometime researching a few commercial portal servers - won’t mention any names here :) … and late one night we stumbled upon Liferay.  We tested it out that night (over a couple beverages)… and found that it was very easy to download and setup, it actually came bundled with Tomcat so it took about 10 minutes to get it up and running.  We were amazed to see when we logged in that the user interface was actually quite easy to follow and there were a number of pre-configured “portlets” available to use with the product.  Oh, and probably the biggest point about the software is that it’s ABSOLUTELY FREE TO USE AND IT’S OPEN SOURCE!

We decided to check out a couple other portal servers, but we always seemed to come back to Liferay.  So, we moved ahead with Liferay Portal Server and began developing/integrating out own Portlets within it.  After a couple of months of tweaking here and there, we had our Business Collaboration Portal ready… OfficeGateway was launched!  Please visit OfficeGateway to find out more about the product if you are interested in using it with your company and/or reselling it.

More on Liferay: to steal a quote from their site that I think sums up why developers should look into it as a possible portal solution:

Companies routinely choose Liferay Portal for its out-of-the-box functionality, compatibility across all major application servers and database platforms, scalability, and the relentless innovation of its development team.

I think that sentence couldn’t sum it up better.  Feel free to visit their site for a demo.  The software has come a long way since day 1.  The interface has improved immensely (the look and feel and number of themes, etc), I believe the API has been improved with each version and it also has AJAX integrated into it now.  Take a look at the demo, you won’t be disappointed.  There is a lot of other information on their site as well, and also a nice story on OfficeGateway and some other case studies on the site.  Check them out to learn more on how Liferay Portal Server has been integrated over the years!  If anyone is interested or has any questions regarding Liferay don’t hesitate to post a comment or contact me directly.

Cheers,

Adrian