At CIGNEX, we view Intranet as a viable medium to foster peer-to-peer collaboration and harness value-enhancing measures across the board in a company. Intranet has proven to be a highly effective channel to bring together employees distributed globally across departments, client verticals, all collaborating for corporate success. A good intranet portal needs to provide easy ways to access data and find other employees. It needs to deliver flawless outcomes on below key parameters -
- Easy navigation
- Present relevant data quickly
- Should drive efficiency and usability across the company
Why Open Source?
Intranet portal systems can be either Open Source or proprietary. While proponents of the licensed software will vouch for its security and functionality benefits, the fact that the corporate world collectively is leaning heavily towards Open Source software depicts its immense popularity. Additionally, cost is one of the biggest components that make Open Source an easy sell to top management within a company.
Let us explore some other benefits Open Source intranet systems that make it a popular choice for small, medium and large enterprises:
- Functionality – Proprietary intranet systems offer fixed set of features and functions sold as off-the-shelf software. However, what works for others might not work for your business-specific needs. What you need is the immense customization potential of Open Source intranet portal systems, to drive visible productivity and increase in efficiency through the portal.
- Compatibility – In Open Source technology, you can easily integrate the system with your existing IT or production environment with your chosen Open Source solution stack. The degree of compatibility with proprietary software is much lower because of their packaged solution offering.
- Tech Support – The ‘per call’ charges associated with tech support of proprietary software is expensive and that makes a difference, especially for a lean startup or emerging business. Open Source intranet solutions offer cost effective technical support with online communities that offers satisfactory resolution to issues. We at CIGNEX also provide dedicated support for enterprises to leverage Open Source Intranets.
- Control – With an Open Source intranet portal, you can roll out your own version updates and integrate it freely with existing or new systems. Unlike licensed portal systems, you are freed from vendor lock-in. This can be a very compelling factor for a dynamic emerging business that is evolving every day.
- Cost of ownership – You no longer have to incur rolling costs associated with the licensed intranet system. As a result, the Total Cost of Ownership is minimized tremendously busing Open Source intranet solutions.
- Budget – We have kept the best differentiator for the last one. Licensed systems are sold at substantial markups. It not only includes initial costs, but also regular costs incurred to keep the system upgraded and running smoothly. This makes the system an unfeasible option that cannot find favor with senior leadership. On the other hand, Open Source software has free source code, massive community tech support, and strong documentation, which helps realize the system’s true potential.
Why Liferay is the Open Source enterprise portal of choice?
The market has a variety of Open Source software systems. However, with holistic enterprise portal offerings, Liferay stands apart as a portal solution of choice for your business. It provides functions and portlets for instant messaging, corporate blogs, content management, enterprise-wide SSO, knowledge base, and document asset management.
The Enterprise Edition of Liferay is tailored to meet the challenging demands of today’s corporate life. It has a slew of amazing features such as the below –
- Ensures redundancy and load spikes to optimize performance of the portal
- Highest degree of security from government grade and industry standard encryption protocols
- Additional security updates keep the system protected from hackers
- Be it small or large deployments, the system is ready to scale up admirably without compromising data integrity or resources overload
Even Gartner views Liferay as the sole Open Source, independent horizontal portal in its Magic Quadrant, and places it as a leader along with other well known commercial, license based solutions.
How can you benefit from Liferay’s features?
CIGNEX can help you develop a powerful intranet for your organization. We can help you set up the system to look and function precisely the way you need. Here are some of the ways in which you can derive immense benefits from Liferay –
- It can offer a deep level of customization meant to suit all types of users within the company. Existing systems and legacy applications can be integrated using SOAP, REST, RSS or APIs
- Because it is tailor made for your business, you need not spend time and efforts learning a whole new system. Administrators can easily edit the interface complete with corporate theme and logo, without having to modify the database.
- It has a range of features for CMS, cross-company collaboration, social interaction and document assets
- Its ease of use has been recognized by many industry stalwarts and speaks volumes for its popularity
- It allows advanced personalization via Drools that enables contextual personalization and modifies the context based on the location, preferences and activity patterns.
Case Study#1
Our blend of Liferay and experience of delivering over 60+ intranet solutions added tremendous value for a 100+ year old pharma giant in Japan. The client needed an employee-oriented intranet collaboration platform to help them interact better and gain rapid access to company’s knowledge resources and executive messages.
Coldfusion was replaced with a much more robust and scalable open-source employee engagement platform. Integrating the CMS, social and knowledge asset repository functionality provided immediate benefits to the client. The client not only saved a massive 70% on licensing costs, it also eliminated redundancy with help of 150+ components/portlets within the Liferay-based Intranet system.
Case Study#2
A hotel chain with a worldwide footprint of 4600 hotels needed a single repository aimed at document management that facilitated the easy saving, share, search, access and retrieval. It also needed a layer of social collaboration amongst its global span of employees to help efficiently streamline operations.
The Liferay based Intranet portal of the hotel group replaced the Plumtree based portal. We executed a flawless data migration with zero downtime and helped set up a single collaborative social intranet portal hosting 200+ applications.
The outcome was a multi-lingual yet unified resource for HR messages, executive directives, corporate documentation and centralized notifications. It succeeded in connecting 130,000 employees from across the globe and provided a fast Open Source platform at a reduced TCO.
Establish a truly connected digital workplace by opting for Liferay as your Open Source intranet portal of choice. We at CIGNEX can help your business to unlock its powerful features and help you benefit from high performance at lower cost of operations.
Additional Resources for Open Source Intranets
http://www.cignex.com/blog/increasing-user-adoption-enterprise-portals-liferay-based-gamification
http://www.cignex.com/presentation/10-must-have-features-your-enterprise-intranet
