At XTIVIA, we have extensive experience delivering enterprise portal, content management, and collaboration solutions since the late 1990s, and have seen this product space mature and evolve over the years. We started with traditional commercial software from the likes of Vignette and Epicentric in the late 1990s, and moving into IBM WebSphere Portal in 2003-2004. IBM WebSphere Portal was our preferred portal platform for a few years until its heavyweight nature and high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) started to wear on us and our customers. Unfortunately none of the Java Portal alternatives were very viable at the time – while Liferay Portal was like a breath of fresh air for us when we started to experiment with it in 2006 (circa v3.6 days), it really was not ready for prime-time from our perspective. We did a few smaller implementations based on Liferay 4.x, but it was not until v5.2 came out that we truly embraced Liferay. And v6.0 and v6.1 have only solidified our preference for Liferay as the best enterprise portal platform for our customers.
So why is Liferay Portal the best portal product in our opinion?
- Liferay has the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to its competitors starting with its licensing and getting it up and running through development costs, operational costs, and training/support costs (from the perspective of infrastructure, developers, administrators, and end users).
- Second-to-none rich out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality around core portal, content management, collaboration, social, mobile, security and more; check out http://www.liferay.com/products/liferay-portal/features/portal for more information.
- All portal products typically need extensions and/or additions to deliver requisite functionality – with Liferay you can simply do more within a specific budget.
- Product innovation – leader in introducing new capabilities whether it be AJAX or friendly URLs or mobile or social
- Improved business agility – it is lightweight in nature; you can quickly get it up and running, and it is easier to develop on/manage.
- A mature Enterprise Open Source (fully supported) product – 24x7x365 platinum support with 1 hour response time SLA; this includes access to all service packs, hot fixes, notifications of security alerts, phone and web based support.
- Liferay’s open architecture and its open source nature help you avoid lock-in to a single proprietary vendor.
- Liferay’s hook and extension plugin model allows you to tailor product behavior to your needs without rewriting from scratch and without creating upgrade hell.
- Liferay offers opportunities for product feature sponsorship to enable contributions back into the core product for key customizations – this allows you to offload responsibility of maintaining and enhancing your custom features back to Liferay.
- Liferay offers you a full choice of application servers, databases, and operating systems to run on, thereby allowing you to leverage your infrastructure and skills investment.
Liferay gives you a solution that works today and is flexible enough to drive future strategic growth. It is simpler than WebSphere and more flexible than SharePoint!
If you need help with your portal strategy or implementation, feel free to contact us at [email protected].