Liferay Launches Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Edition at the Liferay West Coast Symposium

Liferay, Inc., provider of the world’s fastest growing enterprise-class open source portal framework, today announced the launch of Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Edition, a full featured portal platform that enables enterprises to collaborate, build communities, and increase revenues. Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Edition (Liferay Portal 6EE) contains enhanced enterprise social collaboration functionality, a built-in Web Content Management system, rich developer tools, and powerful support features.

“Gartner put Liferay in its leader/visionary quadrant in 2010 for a reason. Liferay 6EE meets the industry's demand for a complete web content management system, combined with social collaboration and portal functionality,” said Paul Hinz, Liferay's Chief Marketing Officer. “With Liferay’s strong mission critical enterprise support, Liferay 6EE is the leading solution for any enterprise looking to build a website, a portal, a collaboration solution, or to replace their aging web portal.”

As part of the launch for this highly anticipated product, Liferay 6EE’s debut will be broadcasted live (www.liferay.com/live), today at 9 a.m. PT, when Liferay founder and Chief Software Architect, Brian Chan will showcase the new features from the stage of Liferay’s West Coast Symposium.

“We’ve been a Liferay partner since 2008 and use their platform to create effective portal experiences for our clients, some of which include Marvell, Qualcomm and Monster Energy. We look forward to the 6EE offering and how it can positively impact the communities of the brands we serve,” said Curt Van Inwegen, VP | Client Services at LEVEL, an independent digital agency that delivers integrated marketing and product development for global brands.

To further engage Liferay’s worldwide community and network, a number of special offers are now available, including a free 30-day trial of Liferay 6EE and a “First Year Free” offer made through the Design with Liferay program to select users who are currently using another enterprise portal product.

What’s New in Liferay 6.0:
Liferay Portal 6EE is an enterprise-grade, low cost, and easy to use solution for building web sites and applications.  Combining portal, web content management and social collaboration into a single package, Liferay 6EE adds multiple enhanced or new capabilities such as:

Web Content Management (WCM) – Liferay’s built-in WCM system makes web publishing, editing, building new pages, assigning workflows and developing templates extremely easy for both technical and non-technical users.

·      Powerful web-publishing with one-click page creation and dynamic templates and structures
·      User-defined workflow that can be applied to both Liferay and non-Liferay tools, leveraging an extremely granular system of roles-based authorization
·      Dynamic content sharing and document management with Microsoft Office® integration
·      Localization into over 30 languages
·      Seamless integration with social collaboration features

Enterprise Social Collaboration – Social features are integrated into the community and organization-centric structure of the portal, allowing departments or other user-defined groups to collaborate in real-time. Notable features include:

·      Enhanced, real-time activity tracking of user and group activity
·      Full suite of RSS-enabled and ratable Wikis, Blogs, and Forums
·      Familiar office tools including enterprise chat, a built-in mail client, personal and group calendars, and address books and contacts
·      Collaborative and team-driven content creation
·      OpenSocial support allowing Google Gadgets to run natively in Liferay
·      Full Social API framework with seamless integration with WCM

Design and Usability – Liferay 6EE offers significant usability enhancements for ease of administration as well as tools to help developers to build dynamic UIs with the Liferay platform. Notable features include:

·      New UI metaframework, Alloy UI, that provides a simple API for building web applications across all three levels of a browser: structure, style and behavior. It works with HTML5, CSS and Javascript.
·      Tasteful use of AJAX technology for a faster and more interactive user experienc
·      Simple and intuitive page and community navigation
·      Familiar desktop conveniences for easy end-user adoption

Extensibility and Integrations – Liferay is flexible, easy to extend, and easy to integrate with external applications and systems. It runs PHP, Ruby, Python, Grails and other lightweight scripting technologies within a robust Java framework, with wide standards and web services support. Notable features include:

·      Liferay Developer Studio, a best-of-breed set of Eclipse plugins that expedites and simplifies plug-in development
·      Built-in social API framework for creating customized social networks
·      Built-in scripting frameworks and flexible scripting support
·      Built-in personalization rules engines
·      A new plugin architecture that fosters the growth of a far-reaching ecosystem of plugins and add-ons for the Liferay platform

Analytics and Management – To help administrators optimize resources and monitor portal performance, Liferay Portal provides helpful dashboards, user activity tracking and management, and key performance statistics (hits/page, average time/hit, max time per request, and more). Notable features include:

·      Simple, clean administrative dashboards for portlet, portal and system performance monitoring
·      Enhanced scalability of the portal’s search engine via ClusterLink, allowing administrators to cluster a series of search engines without a SAN
·      Sharding capabilities that greatly improve space optimization and usage of the portal database
·      Liferay Enterprise Support Application (LESA), a new, easy to use enterprise-grade support interface for customers

“With tens of thousands of enterprises facing ‘end of feature life’ for their current portal, enterprises should leverage the ‘Design with Liferay’ program and begin evaluating Liferay 6EE now,” said Liferay’s Hinz.

About Liferay, Inc.

Liferay is the provider of leading enterprise open source portal and collaboration software products, used by companies worldwide, including Allianz, AutoZone, Benetton Group, Cisco Systems, Lufthansa Flight Training, The French Ministry of Defense, and the United Nations. The company offers professional services, technical support, custom development and professional training to ensure successful deployment in the most demanding IT environments.

Liferay, Liferay Portal, and the Liferay logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Liferay, Inc., in the United States and other countries.