Liferay Releases Major Update To Liferay Portal

If there is a process, procedure, or bit of documentation that I need to remember and share with the other members of my team, it lives in Liferay Portal. The open source enterprise collaboration software has quickly become central to our team workflow, and daily keeps us organized and on task. Version 6.2 was announced Monday at the Liferay Symposium North America in San Francisco, and includes a number of new features and improvements.

Building a tool with as many features as Liferay Portal is not easy, and neither is organizing the features in an understandable way. So, it is understandable that some of the biggest headline features of the new release focus on responsive web design, an updated user interface based on Twitter Bootstrap, and an improved management interface. Liferay has also increased the security and resiliency of Portal by including sandbox isolation for portlets. The new internal architecture is far more modular, and supports more reliable upgrades, with the option to roll back if an upgrade goes awry.  

Our team focuses on using a small part of Liferay Portal, the Wiki, for our central documentation repository, but there is much, much more to it than that. Bryan Cheung, the CEO of Liferay said:

Today’s enterprises need to interact with their customers, partners, and employees through compelling, seamless experiences across several channels. Liferay Portal 6.2 is a modern, intuitive platform designed to help enterprises understand and reach their customers across mobile, web, and live contexts.

Portal includes:

• Content & Document Management with Microsoft Office integration
• Web Publishing and Shared Workspaces
• Enterprise Collaboration
• Social Networking and Mashups
• Enterprise Portals and Identity Management

Liferay Portal is an example of enterprise software done right, which is so very hard to do. The concentration on the user interface in this release speaks volumes to how different an organization Liferay is. It is not uncommon for enterprise software to score the absolute worst in usability, so it is good to see an open source company stepping in to provide something both flexible and powerful, while keeping an eye on design.

The 6.2 release candidate is available to download now, with a final version following soon.