Ever since its release in 2006, Liferay has been scaling newer heights of success. Its current stable version 6.2 packs in a punch with powerful enterprise features that extend its amazing functionality, thus giving clients a beautiful blend of lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and superior performance when compared to other enterprise portal platforms.
Today, we explore 7 crucial factors as defined in Liferay’s whitepaper to consider when choosing a particular portal platform and how Liferay scores on each of these factors. Let’s look at these–
1. Does the platform comply with global current standards?
We strongly believe in favoring standards based technology over proprietary technology. There are several compelling factors behind this line of reasoning, These include widespread knowledge resources, compatibility with third party systems and JSR, WebDAV and JAAS standards, and better life span due to common code base.
Advantage Liferay –
Liferay supports all the above standards very well, making it a forward looking, scalable platform, as compared to regressive proprietary platforms.
2. Does the platform ensure personalization?
Identity Management Systems help increase the level of personalized user experiences. Some of the best practices such as two factor authentication and customized content sharing needs to be a de-facto standard of a modern platform.
Advantage Liferay –
Liferay supports most of the worldwide industry practices and systems in Identity management, by offering full compatibility and support with:
- LDAP services
- Oracle Access Manager
- CA SiteMinder
- Sun Identify Manager/Open SSO
Instead of programming from ground up, developers can simply use these as ‘Plug and Play’ into the Liferay ecosystem.
3. Does the platform support granular permissions power?
A lot of credit for highly personalized user experiences goes to a blend of permissions and authentication. The three key considerations to enable this are:
- Micro level permissions to help ensure granular access levels based on various parameters such as roles and hierarchy
- Extending portlet permissions of base platform to integrate seamlessly within the portal platform
- Portal security architecture to enable logical and hierarchical segmentation
Advantage Liferay –
Liferay has a well-defined mechanism to provide deep level of access control, so that a particular user sees and accesses only that part of information/ content that he/she has been cleared for.
4. Are current UI expectations from users met satisfactorily?
The rise of mobile, smartphones, and rich interactions place equal emphasis to UI design and performance. A portal must look, feel, and perform consistently and securely on any device – desktop or mobile.
Advantage Liferay –
Liferay has built-in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that helps design and deploy a clean architecture. This entails both template and custom business logic written and kept in server side, away from the client side. Liferay also enforces security at the service and business object model level.
5. Is multiple RIA client frameworks support possible?
Some popular RIA frameworks include jQuery, Yahoo UI library, Alloy UI and Google Web Toolkit. It is important to select the right framework for your enterprise needs, and also to have the portal work well with the same.
Advantage Liferay –
Liferay not only supports these client frameworks but also can combine multiple libraries into single resource for optimizing HTTP requests. Its ability to combine requests across multiple portlets that use the same resources into one request, translates to benefits at many levels – lesser load, faster load time, better user experience.
6. How much can it support CMS?
A sturdy portal needs to have its own CMS and integrate well with external CMS systems too.
Advantage Liferay –
By winning the coveted the most popular Java-based CMS system award in Water & Stone’s 2010 Open Source CMS, Liferay has proved its mettle as one of the best CMS around. Its cutting edge features include importing of external repositories, control HTML through a WYSIWYG editor and the ability to define and use structured content types
7. Is the portal social?
Tying up user experiences to business value entails going social for the portal.
Advantage Liferay –
Liferay empowers social integration at two levels –
- Full integration with popular social networking platforms for better user experience
- Smooth support for third party apps and gadgets
To Wrap Up
We, at CIGNEX strongly believe in the direct correlation of smooth user experience with the success of a particular portal. Having proven its mettle in this area, Liferay surely scores way above its competitors and comes across as a preferred portal platform of choice.
CIGNEX and Liferay
CIGNEX has ample experience in devising and developing Open Source portals built on Liferay. We have the proficiency to leverage some of its advanced features like Audience Targeting. This helps us to ensure a greater degree of engagement with the customer through an interactive platform. This in turn, helps drive superior user experience – a key to all-round success for a portal platform.
