Liferay Announces Liferay Marketplace and Liferay Portal 6.1 at its West Coast Symposium

SOURCE:  Liferay

LOS ANGELES–(PRWeb)–Liferay, Inc., provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, today announced at its West Coast Symposium the beta release for the newest version of the company’s flagship product, Liferay Portal 6.1, as well as the developer community release of the new Liferay Marketplace. These releases enhance Liferay’s end user capabilities for business people and simplify the development of modular web-based solutions.

Liferay Marketplace is a channel for Liferay’s worldwide community of developers and partners to reach Liferay’s broad installation base with enterprise applications and plugins that augment Liferay Portal’s core portal, collaboration, and web content management (WCM) platform. With Marketplace offerings enhancing Liferay’s lightweight platform, customers will be able to build sites and web-based solutions at accelerated speeds.

First previewed at the Liferay East Coast Symposium in May, the Liferay Marketplace hits the first phase of its launch at the West Coast Symposium with a developer-ready release, which includes an SDK for app development. Liferay is already awaiting plugin contributions from several ISV partners, including Alfresco, Omegabit, ProfIT Software, Roambi, salsaDev, SocialEkwity, TandemSeven, Vaadin, and Xtivia.

“With Marketplace and Liferay Portal 6.1, there will be more situations than ever where enterprises will want to use Liferay as the foundation for their applications, because Liferay is now so much more than a portal,” said Paul Hinz, Liferay’s Chief Marketing Officer. “Marketplace makes it faster for users to deploy new features to existing websites and portals, and it gives the Liferay community access to the large market of Liferay users worldwide. Just as our open source development model has reduced costs for our core platform, Marketplace will reduce the cost of deploying extensions for our community.”

Liferay Portal 6.1 builds on the platform capabilities of Liferay 6.0 by adding significant enhancements for end users. This release elevates Liferay’s WCM capabilities; adds new features for document management; and enhances staging, publishing and site management, all with a strong focus on improving the out-of-the-box user experience. Liferay 6.1 also adds support for Data Lists and Workflow Forms, popular features for business users that allow them to build lightweight business applications without software developer intervention. Along with its new capabilities, Liferay Portal 6.1 maintains the same API-layers and architecture from Liferay 6.0 released in 2010.

The following are major highlights of Liferay Portal 6.1’s new features: Powerful Document Management

• A revamped user interface simplifies management with unified document and image library, live document previews, and an Explorer-like interface.
• Custom document type definitions with extended meta-data allow end users to define business documents (e.g., Budget Proposal, Employee Review, Promotional Video).
• Administrators can define unique workflows per document type per folder.
• Support for mounting multiple simultaneous external CMIS repositories allows users to access all enterprise resources in a single location, including SharePoint and Documentum.

Business User Tools: Data Lists, Web Forms and Workflow

• User-defined Data Lists capture custom information (e.g., RSVPs, tasks, inventory, or issues) using a spreadsheet-like or forms-based view.
• Easy-to-build business forms with visual UI, which can then be assigned to predefined or custom workflows, can be built and modified by users as business processes change.

Enhanced Publishing and Site Management

• WCM branching allows users to work simultaneously on several variations of a site (e.g., seasonal or campaign-specific variations) and schedule publication dates for each.
• Enhanced staging includes automatic versioning with history and undo for sites and pages.
• Content displays based on user profile attributes offer higher levels of personalization.
• Hierarchical site templates simplify site management by ensuring sites are automatically updated when its template is updated.

Liferay Web Platform Capabilities

• Support for OpenSocial 1.1 allows web-based social applications built from gadgets to be managed and deployed directly to pages and sites.
• Improved, validated scalability for high-volume business applications.

The beta release will be available for download October 14, and community members can receive the latest build by contacting Liferay’s Community Manager. Liferay Portal 6.1 CE and EE GA will be available to the public in Q4 2011. For more information about Liferay Portal 6.1 and the Liferay Marketplace, listen live to our streaming webcasts from the West Coast Symposium at http://www.liferay.com/web-events.

About Liferay, Inc.:

Liferay, Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise open source portal and collaboration software products, recognized by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant and used by Fortune 500 companies worldwide, including Allianz, Barclay’s, BASF, Benetton Group, Cisco Systems, Lufthansa Flight Training, Société Générale, The French Ministry of Defense, and the United Nations. Liferay offers Enterprise Edition subscriptions, which provide access to emergency fixes, software updates, 24/7 support SLAs, and subscription-only features. Liferay also offers professional services and training to ensure successful deployments for its customers. Liferay, Liferay Portal, and the Liferay logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Liferay, Inc., in the United States and other countries.

Liferay, Inc.
Rebecca Cho
1-877-LIFERAY
pr@liferay.com
Twitter: Liferay