Liferay Competes Against Software's Top Dogs

Portals are essential in today's Internet driven society. Portals are a gateway to transfer related knowledge and data between a provider and a user. Although portals may seem to be obtrusive, they are in fact beneficial to both the user and the provider, making them a "no-brainer" when identifiable users are required. Users benefit from portals because they enhance user experience, allow personalization, and provide a gateway to view and create data associated with the provider's organization. Providers benefits from a portal because they can track account information and usage, easily create and share organizational data, as well as increase business values by providing a simple medium for users to interact with them.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been doing research at work for a large web portal that we are about to build with a client. A large part of my role has been to research and test existing portal frameworks. There is quite a variety of portal frameworks available on the market, but really only four that are leaders in the field. The leaders list (which was created in a study on portal evaluations by Gartner) consists of Microsoft'sSharepoint, IBM'sWebSphere, Oracle'sWebCenter and Liferay. I would guess if you are unfamiliar with portal frameworks that you have heard of all of those companies except for one... Liferay, being a hopeful cost-effective option as it is an open-source enterprise portal framework. Open-source software (OSS) is becoming increasingly popular in the software community and is usually desired if the reliability and functionality meets or exceeds that of competitors. Although cost is a bonus factor to OSS, a large technology factor that should never be overlooked is the product support and available help for the software and lifetime. Even though OSS may have associated licensing costs for production use, it is often a much cheaper solution then competitors if the business goals can be met.

The viewpoint that I have had in evaluating portals is that of the users. Although I am a developer and would love to dive into the technical and programming side of the evaluation, a more important role that must pass evaluation first is the general usability of the portal. The usability of the framework features provided to organizational users and the clientele users is much more important than the difficulty of the programming integration with the framework. Why? Because user experience is the heartbeat of all web applications. Keep the users happy, and the site will live a long and healthy life, don't, and you can watch the site sick on life support till it dies.

To evaluate the portal I was only looking for what the framework provided off the shelf (OTS). By OTS, I mean no programming or hooks to change the functionality of the framework. Strictly downloading and unzipping the server instance… that is all. In evaluation of the Liferay portal there were guidelines and test criteria that were an essential "must" to meet business goals and be considered further. One factor I kept notice of was to make sure that if some criteria's needed functionality was not currently supported, could it be? And if so, how difficult and time consuming will the modifications be? The specific guidelines and criteria that are desired in a framework vary for the different types of business goals and value looking to be delivered. However, with my research and experience with the Liferay portal I have created a list of the OTS features that I like and dislike about it from a usability standpoint, as well as a developer about to be arms deep in it.

Liferay features that make me glad to be using the framework:

1. The 60+ portlets that come integrated in the Liferay framework to help get started.
2. Intuitive feature layout to help customize and create the portal architecture quickly.
3. The simplicity of having portal configuration options easily accessible all in one place on the browser.
4. The ability to "Impersonate" users of the portal to check their permission on sensitive data quickly.
5. An active community forum that helps get quick answers to any questions.
6. It’s easy integration with Liferay Developer Studio (Eclipse) allowing programmers to quickly get their hands dirty.

Suggested changes to Liferay to increase the framework's popularity:

1. Create intuitive saving options. Currently after saving, the saved changes window does not close automatically, leaving the user confused and frustrated.
2. Allow the user to set up role specific permissions on content AS it is being created/uploaded. Instead of making the user set role specific permission on content AFTER it has already been created/uploaded.
3. Increase documentation and tutorials on the features the portal has to offer.

Learning new technology and what it provides is a crucial part of my job. Developers deem themselves as being "lazy", meaning that we will never re-invent the wheel if there is a perfectly capable wheel available for use. If frameworks can be provided that will help meet business goals and reduce costs, it's no longer a question of "should we use one", but instead "which one should we use". Liferay has been a fun framework to research and work with, and I hope that it will continue to impress my team and I with the functionality that it offers to help deliver a world class portal.