Content and Knowledge Management #

Help increase adoption and making available knowledge easily accessible.

Sharing Content #

Web content is now more ubiquitous among communities with the new Global scope. It makes sharing web content, including structures and templates, across communities easier and efficient.

Other content, such as documents and images, can also be shared across communities with the Asset Publisher Portlet.

Tags and Categories #

Tags and Categories make organizing and finding relevant content easier. By tagging and categorizing information, users are able to discern what kind of information they are looking for, which kind of content is most popular, or even what kind of information they are looking at.

Tags and categories can easily be managed through the control panel. We've also improved the Taxonomy management and API for developers.

Custom Attributes #

With the ability to define custom attributes for all entities within the portal, users will be able to create the searchable attributes they need to efficiently manage information within the portal. Exporting documents in an archive, integrating custom attribute views in tables, and custom search queries for attributes are just a few of the benefits with this advancement.

Abuse Reporting #

Community based monitoring reduces cost on managing unruly content within your site. Users are able to report offensive and inappropriate content to community managers. This feature is available on forums, blogs, and any page within the portal.

Showing the Difference #

Users are able to distinctly identify updates within wikis to correct, further improve, or approve the information submitted.

This feature is also coming soon to Document Library and Web Content.

Asset Publisher and Filters Galore #

The improved Asset Publisher Portlet enables users to have more control over content published across communities, or even in single communities by filtering only relevant Asset types, tags and categories to the specified community(s).

Knowledge Base Plugin #

The Knowledge Base Plugin enables companies to consolidate and manage the most accurate information in one place. Imagine a user manual that is always updated. Users are able to rate and provide feedback on these knowledge base articles.

Integrated Workflow #

Users are able to manage the content creation process with a workflow. This helps content creators collaborate and go through the necessary steps in order to produce better and more accurate content. Within a workflow, a type of document, wiki entry or web content can go through approval processes that refines these assets. The integrated workflow within Liferay supports JBPM 3 workflows. Future support for Intalio available in Enterprise Edition.

Platform Management #

Portlet Performance Monitoring #

There are many variables that could cause a page, portlet, or even your portal to slow down or break. With JMX administrators can investigate possible causes for these issues and help developers fix or improve how specific portlets work.

Auditing #

The Audit Framework enables the portal to capture records of events that can be viewed and processed later. This gives administrators the capability to monitor users based on specific events. This information becomes useful for user accountability. These procedures can be done through a basic user interface. For developers, hooks are available for role grants and removals, document updates, journal content updates, and more. (Enterprise Edition only)

Analytics and Tracking #

With the Report Engine Framework and the ability to integrate the portal with Jasper and BIRT, users with access can have reports catered to them. Within this feature is the capability to schedule a time for execution and distribution of the report. Users can also create reports from analytical and data from the Auditing Service. With these functions, tracking user patterns, adoption, and portal growth is more accurate and can help organizations plan ahead for future goals. (Enterprise Edition only)

All for One, One for All #

New ClusterLink provides a simplified framework for communication across clustered portal instances. With this approach, managing your data infrastructure becomes a bit simpler. Administrators would be able to cluster a Lucene Search Engine without deploying SOLR, integrate it with a Rules Engine for self monitoring and management, and simplify cluster management when linked with a Scripting Service.

Scripting Based Management #

Through the scripting console, users are able to execute any migration or management code instantly. The portal allows these instances to be isolated or with ClusterLink, have the ability to execute it across the cluster if the user prefers.

Sharding #

Sharding lets administrators distribute data and load across several databases automatically or manually. This helps administrators scale the portal to their liking.

UI and Usability #

Clear, Concise Navigation #

With the new Dockbar, administrating and managing the portal becomes much more intuitive. It contains shortcut for commonly used portal components, and direct links to communities that the user or administrator belongs to. In addition to the Dockbar, we've also improved breadcrumbs to let users know where they are and visually guide them through continuing pages.

Improved UI for the Document Library #

The improved Document Library features a cleaner UI, a link specific for each document, and integrated metadata for discussion, actions, history among other things. Each designated linked document page is integrated with the global breadcrumb.

One Click Page Creation #

The new improved UI doesn't just make the portal for users prettier to use. Once a user has added a page, the user get's a drop down quick configuration for the page that will add portlets the the user's liking. Perhaps the user would like to build a blog page, in the past, this would have involved numerous mouse clicks and typing. Now with the new UI, the user just has to add the page, select the kind of page template they would like to use- in this case, it would be a blogs page, upon clicking the page template, the portal adds the most common and appropriate portlets to the page. This let's the user get the portal up and running, configured to their liking.

One Click Communities Creation #

Administrators, while creating new communities now have the option of selecting the type of community they would like to create, the portal then propogates the community with pages and portlets relevant to the community type that the administrator selected. If any of the user's pages have an undesired portlet, they can easily be removed from the page.

Self-Explanatory Content Authoring #

We've improved on the user's experience in creating content by including more graphical tools for authoring content structures. We've also updated tool tips and other information that can ease content creator's role in filling out web content forms.

Extension and Integration #

Generic Asset Framework #

The Generic Asset Framework allows developers to leverage Liferay's workflow, social tagging, and security features by providing services for custom content assets. Developers are even able to add new Assets from a plugin.

Alloy UI Framework #

Alloy UI takes common design patterns and makes them easier to implement, this way, developers spend less time designing, and more time creating usable plugins with usable interfaces. These visual elements are available for common interface elements in Tag libraries. Alloy UI also supports many of the HTML5 conventions, this gives UI developers the freedom to design the portal in the upcoming W3C standard.

Vaadin Framework #

Built in Vaadin Framework provides server-side development model for building portlets with rich user interfaces. The framework is unique by allowing all user interfaces development to be done in Java with no HTML, JavaScript or XML writing required. Vaadin provides a complete set of user interface components and is extensible with Google Web Toolkit with a large number of add-ons already available.

Rules Engine Based Personalization #

Developers are now able to target information based on a user's demographical information. This enables portlets and plugins to deliver more relavant content to the user, which makes a smarter portal.

Scripting Framework #

The Scripting framework enables developers to empower users by allowing them to script and extend applications built off the portal.

Reuse the Features of Liferay's Portlets #

Developers have the ability to reuse many of the features of Liferay's native portlets enabling them to build more integrated and robust applications with Liferay.

Here are just some of the features that developers are able to use:

• Workflow
• Custom Attributes
• Report Abuse
• Pretty Diffs
• Global Breadcrumbs

All of which adds to the existing: comments, ratings, tags & categories, caching,...

Integration with External Sytems #

The Document Library will provide "out-of-the-box" integration with Documentum(Enterprise Edition only) and CMIS. In addition to this, we've also enhanced Sharepoint integration and we've featured the Atom publishing protocol in Blogs and other activities, and we plan on implementing more.