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.