Liferay Portal

Liferay is an open source website and intranet portal development software which is free in every sense of the word though their is an enterprise version of the software as well. This platform is similar to a content management system but it's more like a framework and was written using Java. It includes common features for use when building out your website such as themes and pages, add-ons, widgets and menus. These features can be enabled for an internal based system as well or intranet. I like that there's not really much programming required for basic website installs and management. But it's a massively configurable software and by it's nature can be extended in a virtually unlimited number of ways. It comes bundled with Apache Tomcat so you're good to go with your servlet container. Liferay can extend into PHP and Ruby languages also so that makes it much more versatile and flexible. Of course you have a full set of features for publishing on the using tools that work pretty much out of the box though customization is virtually unlimited and it's possible to do a whole lot more than just intranets using this tool. The tool integrates with Microsoft Office which is awesome as that's home for documentation and a knowledge base. This is a seemingly minor feature that can have a nice impact because of the real time document and file sharing possible which makes it possible to work very efficiently in a team even if you're remote. There's a big community available for open source software which are always great for troubleshooting. There you have access to regular users yet expert developers often hang out too making it quite easy to get help freely which is awesome because people in the open source community tend to be very generous with their time.

I'm still new but to Liferay understand that upgrading from one version to another is quite challenging and that it's necessary to have quite a lot of planning and development in order to do so. I also understand that backwards compatibility can be an issue so it may seem like you must upgrade or you leave a lot on the table so to speak. As the upgrades tend to be that awesome. So I wouldn't call this a low maintenance software but would feel confident that it is stable and reliable nonetheless. And the documentation is a bit scattered but that's quite common as it's basically crowd sourced and often found in the most relevant ways on community boards. I also understand that talented engineers are a bit harder to come by than other platforms so it's a bit more of a challenge to hire for the long term due to job recruiters and talent poaching.

There is an impressive amount of customization and configuration available in Liferay. On a granular level you can setup permissions for individuals which is as much depth in an application as you can get. The amount of portlets available for Liferay is excellent as well. Overall, it's a very high quality open source software with big backers of the technology so you know the infrastructure is built for growth and extensibility. You can't beat the price either. If you can find a talented Liferay developer this could be a great fit for your website and intranet portals it will enable you to communicate and share documentation using a single sign on if you're savvy enough.