Liferay – The Most Appropriate Framework for Enterprise Intranet Development

Now that the Internet is ubiquitous and easily available on any device, including hand-held

smartphones and tablets, more and more enterprises are opting for making their web

presence felt across all devices. However, various threats and multiple security problems on

the Internet force them to use an intranet application across the enterprise, whether they

are local or global.

With the BYOD revolution gaining popularity the native mobile applications add to the

charm of an intranet portal to work along in a connected environment. Enterprises have win-

win situations as they get absolute secured intranet, latest software, data consistent via

cloud, and mobile devices available to increase efficiency and productivity of their work

force.

Although there are plenty of platforms available to build a comprehensive enterprise

intranet, but one stands out with most popularity among the enterprises – Liferay. Liferay is

an open source platform with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and tons of features and

functionality needed for building a robust enterprise intranet portal. Choosing the right

platform for developing an intranet portal becomes easy with Liferay, but the hard part is

choosing what you need in an ideal intranet portal for enterprises in modern eras.

Audience & Users of Enterprise Intranet Portals

Intranet portals are quite different from the internet portals as they have altogether

different sets of users/user groups and audience. Being an intranet portal, it has limited

audience, but all should have proper authentication to log-in and access the intranet

according to their role or part assigned.

If we look at the common standard enterprise structures, we will have super admin and

admin roles assigned to the higher authorities including boards of directors. There are

numbers of various departments working in an enterprise and they have specific usage

needs of portal and have content schedules. Therefore, it is vital to assign them different

roles with different sets of permissions at super admin and admin levels.

In short, we need excellent back-end system for our enterprise portal and fortunately,

Liferay has all powers to assign you with an ease. As Liferay has SOA and flexible framework

to integrate or incorporate innovative third-party components to achieve extended

functionality at back-end and front end.

Features & Functionality Needed for Enterprise Portals

The very first expectation of enterprise portal owners is easy to install and manage.

Fortunately, Liferay is an open source and have big community as well as plenty of

documents available to guide any level of user. Liferay inherit all benefits of open source such

as affordability, room for improvements through customization of source code, availability of

updates in terms of technicality as well as in knowledge.

Forum

With Liferay, you can create an intranet sharing forum, where you can share anything that is

digital with others and with different level of permissions. This enables various teams to

work in a collaborative environment within team as well as with other teams too. If you set a

permission level, only desired groups of people on your enterprise will read or access your

documents and other multimedia content.

Discussion forums and wiki enable people of enterprise to exchange their ideas, thoughts,

and knowledge freely. You can develop blogs with Liferay on your intranet for limited

audiences as well as by-and-large on internet by publishing them on internet front end of the

enterprise website.

Work Management

Most of the enterprises have priorities with work management and work automation on

intranet. In due course, you can develop a shared calendar for groups and different calendars

for different groups to ease work management with the help of Liferay.

Rapid & Modern Communication

An instant messenger of different levels is the prime need for collaborative environment and

Liferay can provide them with modern concepts and technologies.

Search Feature

Since enterprise portal is a voluminous intranet website in other terms therefore, depending

on simple or advance navigation scheme may slow or worsen the user experiences. In due

course, Liferay offers development of advance search or integration of various advance

search engines for better user experiences.