Capability Paper

InfoAxon Powered Liferay Portal

InfoAxon’s Liferay capability profile

InfoAxon’s Liferay capability profile

Capability Paper

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Liferay ‘Turbo-charged’ By InfoAxon

Powerful & Rich Open Source Portal AlternativeA new breed of Portals is emerging which provide cross cutting capabilities around mash up of Content, Collaboration, and Social. A new age portal can resemble any of the following:

1. Collaborative Content & Knowledge Management Solutions

2. Content rich dynamic corporate portals / websites

3. Enterprise 2.0 Social Intranets / Extranets

4. Content & Data Mash up Platforms

5. Multi tenant SaaS Platforms for delivering innovative services to end-users

6. Social Network or Communities of Practices (CoPs) based collaboration Platform

7. Workflow enabled Document Management, Team- and Task-centric Platform

Organizations are fast realizing that they can’t address most of the above (and many other) use cases by building on closed source, proprietary Portal products which are too expensive, rigid and complicated. Usually these solutions are achieved by Integration of various other frameworks and tools with the Portal platform.

Open source Portal Platforms provide a viable alternative solution to meet the Content Management, Social and Collaboration needs of today’s knowledge driven organizations. By their very nature, open source Portal Platforms are more flexible, based on open standards and less expensive to acquire, deploy and support than proprietary solutions.

Liferay fits the billLiferay, an open source Portal and Collaborative Content Management Platform, fits the bill. It’s simple enough for non-technical users to easily create, edit, and manage web and enterprise content. Yet it provides powerful capabilities that will streamline development and reduce time to market.

Liferay offers:

Built-in content management

Flexible SOA application integration platform

Enterprise grade collaboration and social networking suite

Intuitive user interface

24x7 enterprise subscription and support

By building on relevant standards and open source technologies, Liferay enhances the potential of the Internet as a medium where diverse and geographically-separated individuals and groups can collectively produce, discuss, and share content, information and ideas.

When correctly designed and implemented with right open source integration partner like InfoAxon, open source Portal Platforms such as Liferay will provide sustainable business benefits.

Capability Paper

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Peace of Mind: InfoAxon powered Liferay Portal SolutionsInfoAxon has been providing content driven web 2.0 portals to its customers globally for over a decade leveraging best-of-the breed open source platforms, frameworks and technologies. Right from its inception, InfoAxon has been involved with open source content management and web portal projects, in capacity of both as the key contributor and solution provider. This has resulted into strong technical expertise with the company as well as business domain knowledge to design, integrate and deliver large scale content management and web portal solutions.

Way back in 2004, InfoAxon worked on Office of Deputy Prime Minister, UK funded APLAWS Pathfinder Project to develop web standards and an Open Source Web Content Management System that could be freely adopted by any local authority in the UK. InfoAxon worked closely with Redhat and other UK Councils to enhance and deploy APLAWS (Accessible Personalized Local Authority Web Sites) CMS product. This resulted into InfoAxon acquiring rich experience of managing open source CMS projects and exposure to open source content management and web portal technologies.

At InfoAxon, we have continuously enhanced our CMS and Web Portal capabilities and adopted ‘Liferay ‘ which is one of the world’s leading Open source Portal and Collaborative Content Management Platforms to deliver rich content and people centric portal solutions. We have rich experience in delivering customized Web Portal, Collaboration and Social Networking Solutions using Liferay as core CMS and Web Portal engine.

InfoAxon Powered Liferay

Capability Paper

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Through our multiple Portal solutions implementations, our engineering teams have further customized and enhanced Liferay with:

New functionalities including creation of content migration service, custom portlets using the JSR-168 and JSR-286 portlet standards and so on.

Customization of core Liferay and out-of-box portlets to fit custom requirements using the EXT and Plug-in-development model in Liferay

Integration with other open source frameworks such as with Alfresco content repository, Pentaho BI Analytics, Orbeon and other open source / proprietary products.

Creation of multi-tenant SaaS based services such as Hosted Retail Analytics, and

Further add-ons (which we call Solution Accelerators) to streamline and fast track Portal based solutions development and deployment for our customers.

Repository of Pre-Integrated Portal SolutionsTo the end customers, this results into alternative, innovative & cost- effective Portal Solutions that meet their needs as opposed to traditional Portal systems that come with rigid, large footprints and require big budgets to implement.

Also, since we already have repository of pre-built, pre-integrated and pre-tested Portal solutions which caters to most of the common Portal, CMS and Collaboration scenarios, considerably less effort is required to implement and maintain Portal solutions for the customers resulting into faster turnaround and lower TCO.

Open Source UnderstandingUsing its unique combination of Liferay expertise and deep understanding of open source model, InfoAxon helps organizations conceptualize, design and deploy open source portal & collaborative content management solutions. This has far reaching effects in ensuring the achievement of business outcomes through a proper Solution rather than just product deployment.

Capability Paper

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Liferay Solutions & ServicesInfoAxon has delivered various solutions leveraging Liferay and other open source frameworks. These are:

1. Community Based Knowledge Network Portals

2. Social Network based Portals

3. Knowledge Management Platforms for International Development and Insurance Organizations

4. Portal & Social Networking Solutions for HIV and AIDS communities in Africa

5. Corporate Web sites based on Liferay Portal

6. Workflow based Grant Management Solutions for Development Fund tracking and monitoring

InfoAxon’s ‘Liferay Integration’ services help organizations extend the value of their Liferay Portal deployments by ensuring proper design, architecture, enhancements and integrations with other enterprise applications to deliver production grade Liferay solutions.

InfoAxon offers following Liferay Solutioning Services:

Liferay Consulting:

InfoAxon can help you with your Liferay Portal initiative in many ways. Our portfolio of Liferay portal services ranges from assessments and recommendations to full blown integration, implementation and deployment.

We bring deep and broad skills with the Liferay platform and associated technologies to help you succeed with your Liferay initiative. Our Liferay Consulting services are tuned to help you get your Liferay Portal up and running quickly. This includes:

1. Liferay installation, setup, configuration and proof of concept

2. Liferay based solution design, architecture, advisory and roadmap

3. Theme, Site, Layout, UI Templates, Portlets design

4. Staff Augmentation (Offshore development of your Liferay projects, Onsite consultant visits)

5. Migration to Liferay, Upgrades and Performance Tuning

6. R&D to jumpstart your Portal based innovative ideas

Liferay Integration & DevelopmentLike most solutions, Liferay implementations are not one-size-fits-all and typically requires integration of some key other open source or proprietary products / frameworks / components to provide an innovative ‘Whole Solution’ to business problems.

InfoAxon works closely with its customers to ensure the right solution is designed for a given business problem / scenario. InfoAxon provides following:

Capability Paper

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Pre-packaged IntegrationsOur existing Liferay based solutions implementations and rich overall open source expertise has resulted into pre-packaged Liferay based Integrations which could be re-used in multiple scenarios. These pre-packaged integrations ‘Liferay Solution Accelerators’ help reduce turnaround time and cost of Liferay based solution implementation.

Some of these Liferay Solution Accelerators are integration of:

1. Content Migration Framework: One of the common scenarios while adopting Liferay based Portal solution is migration of content from customer’s existing portal / website / external source. Depending upon the existing content items types and its associations the migration of live data from existing system to Liferay could be cumbersome and time consuming. Our team has developed an easy to implement ‘migration framework’ to migrate content to Liferay. The framework can import the following data from other systems.

User Data, Profiles

Web pages

Web contents

Documents

Any other content

The main components of the framework are several REST based services built leveraging Liferay and Pentaho Kettle ETL tool.

2. Authentication / Single Sign On (SSO): Integration with your preferred security mechanisms including your corporate LDAP or Active Directory

3. ECM Framework: Integration with Alfresco ECM framework for JCR content repository, versioning , metadata, workflow, exposing content as service using REST framework

4. Web 2.0 Experience: Integration with zK framework for rich web2.0 experience and pre-designed UI components

5. X-Forms Engine: Integration with Orbeon X-Forms Engine to design and publish X-Forms

6. Workflow Engine: Integration with jBPM to design and create business specific Task Model and Custom Workflows

7. Business Intelligence & Analytics: Integration with Pentaho Platform to provide rich Dashboards, Reports and Graphs

8. Portlets: Some of the new Portlets developed and pre-packaged by InfoAxon are:

a. Liferay – Facebook Portlet

b. Liferay – Twitter portlet

c. Wall Portlet for display of User Activity Feeds

d. Notification and Alerts Portlet

e. Bookmark Portlet enhanced

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f. Private Message Box

g. Content Watch list for Users

h. Suggestions – Contents, Friends (Colleagues), Groups

i. User Interests

j. Group Specializations

k. Image Albums

l. Document Library

m. Social Media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter integration

n. Federated Search for the Web

Web

Images

Videos

Bookmarks

News

o. User Wall posts, Comments

p. Ideas

q. Private Message Box

r. Collaboration – Wikis, Blogs, Forums

s. User, Group Profile

t. Notifications

u. User, Group Tag Profile

9. REST Service Layer: InfoAxon has developed a REST Layer on top of Liferay Portal to implement Loose Integration between external applications

Capability Paper

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Custom Integration & DevelopmentBased upon the unique requirements of customers, InfoAxon provides Custom Integration and further Development on Liferay Platform to create rich content-centric collaborative applications. Such integrations and development leverages:

1. Liferay EXT Environment: To customize and further develop on existing Liferay Portlets, Services, Themes, and Layouts etc.

2. Liferay Plug-in Framework: To develop and hot-deploy new functionalities and enhancements

3. JSR-168, JSR-286 Portlet specifications

4. UI development around

a. New Theme creation:

i. JQuery

ii. Velocity

iii. HTML5

iv. YUI

v. CSS

b. Custom Layout Templates

c. Location, Departmental Themes

5. Integration of Liferay Portal with other Platforms / Frameworks / Applications: Integration with Liferay Portal could be achieved leveraging:

a. Loose Integration based on REST Layer: InfoAxon has developed a REST layer within Liferay Framework to consume various service exposed by external applications

b. Portlet Based Integration: Using WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) an OASIS-approved network protocol standard designed for communications with remote Portlets.

c. IFRAME: Configuring IFRAME Portlet within Liferay.

Business Continuity Support & TrainingInfoAxon leverages its rich and deep expertise in Liferay Portal to provide professional Support and Maintenance services which ensures business continuity of the implemented solution. InfoAxon provides following business continuity support services:

1. Corrective Support and Maintenance of Liferay based solution and the entire stack

2. SLA based issue/bug resolution

3. Regular System and Data Backups

4. Regular Audits and Advisory

Capability Paper

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The success of business solution implementation depends upon how well it is adopted within the organization and empowering various stake holders (end users, administrators, developers) with the ability to perform their task better.

InfoAxon creates ‘value’ for its customers by ensuring success of Liferay initiative by providing practical know-how and actionable knowledge in form of Training Services. These Training Services cover Portal Solution Development, Integration, Deployment and Administration of Liferay Platform and InfoAxon’s Agile & Iterative solution development methodology.

InfoAxon Training covers:

Business Users Training

Administrator Training

Developer Training

Capability Paper

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Contribution to Open Source CommunityInfoAxon’s Content & Knowledge Management Team is continuously involved in various R&D activities around Liferay Portal Platform and other open source tools, technologies and framework. As a result, the team has created several ‘innovations’ which have been contributed to open source community in form of open source projects.

Find below few such contributions:

Liferay – Facebook Integration

InfoAxon’s KM Team has developed a Facebook Portlet for its Liferay based KM Platform ‘fusionKM’. The Portlet enables integration between users’ Facebook account and Liferay Portal.

InfoAxon has contributed the ‘Facebook-Liferay Integration Portlet’ to the open source community as a GPL licensed open source project. The code is available for download on Google Code:

URL for Download : http://code.google.com/p/liferay-facebook-portlet/

The Facebook Portlet allows users to access and interact with their Facebook accounts without leaving the Liferay Portal environment. Provides following capabilities:

View your Wall posts, post new updates See and manage your full Facebook profile View your friends See full posts and comments Post links, videos, URLs in your Facebook update

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Login to your Facebook Account

Facebook – My Home Page

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Liferay – Twitter Integration

Users within the Liferay portal environment would like to access their Twitter feeds and also post updates. InfoAxon has developed a Liferay-Twitter Integration Portlet which allows Twitter experience within the Liferay portal environment.

The Liferay-Twitter Portlet is further being open sourced by InfoAxon as a GPL project on Google Code. The code for the portlet could be downloaded from:

URL for Download : http://code.google.com/p/liferay-twitter-portlet/

The Liferay-Twitter portlet allows user to interact with their Twitter account within their Liferay portal environment. It allows:

Post new tweets, reply to tweets, and re-tweet.

View Your Followers

View People whom you are following

View Twitter Trends.

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Login to your Twitter Account

Twitter – My Home

Capability Paper

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Pre-Integrated Liferay SolutionsFrom very early on we were focused around Content, Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence as our area of expertise. This focus has resulted into separate open source Content & Knowledge Management, and BI practice within the organization with dedicated teams and a shared R&D infrastructure. The practice teams and growing implementations have resulted into pre-integrated KM and BI Platforms – fusionKM and fusionBI.

These are pre-integrated and tested Platforms built through Integration of Liferay Portal with other best of the breed open source platforms and frameworks such as Alfresco, Pentaho, Orbeon etc.

fusionKM – Collaborative Content & Knowledge Management Platform

fusionKM is a ‘Collaborative Content & Knowledge Management’ solution enabling users to create, store, manage and share organizational knowledge in a highly collaborative manner within a secured virtual environment. It allows organizations to create departments, networks, projects, groups and enables users to work, create and share knowledge in a collaborative environment.

fusionKM provides workflow and process based framework within a socialNetworking context. Intelligent knowledge spaces come alive around Projects, Groups and enable users to share knowledge working in a collaborative environment.

fusionKM provides users with a single Search capability to search information and knowledge assets, not only from the in-premise knowledge bank but also from World Wide Web.

The rich knowledge repository of fusionKM constitutes of Wikis, Blogs, Discussion Forums, Emails, Media files etc. like social networking platform. People make connections; join Groups or Communities thus creating professional network and knowledge base.

By using fusionKM organizations can quickly establish internal KM Solution and develop their internal business process and taxonomy.

Technology Stack

Liferay® Enterprise Portal Alfresco® ECMS BIRT / Pentaho BI

Reporting Open Office JBPM JQuery, YUI Lucene MySQL Apache Tomcat

Features

Content / Document / Knowledge Management

Document Library Version Management Document Check-in / out Document Transformation PDF Generation Public / Private Content Knowledge Repository

Network Knowledge

Record Management Image Management Web CMS

Content Tagging Watch list

Page Comments

Page Ratings

RSS Feeds Message Boards

Bookmarks

Capability Paper

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Solution HighlightsService Oriented Architecture (SOA)

The solution is designed and architected in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), making it fully extensible and integrated with organizations internal and legacy systems.

Repository as Service

The full knowledge repository can be exposed as REST based HTTP services, making the solution ready to serve as knowledge provider to other systems.

Business Process

The integrated business process engine can be configured to implement any workflow processes of any industry or organization. It has integrated modules for Reporting, Timesheet, Project Management, Task Management, Escalation etc.

Portal

Full featured JSR complaint portal framework with lots of built in applications such as Wiki, Blog, Discussion Forum, Calendar, Theme, Web CMS, Document Management, and Private Messaging etc.

CMIS

fusionKM is CMIS compliant platform which enables interoperability between other Enterprise Content Management Systems.

Protocols

A number of industry standard protocols such as WebDAV, IMAP, CIFS, FTP etc are supported in fusionKM making the platform pluggable to other complaint systems.

Intranet ready

fusionKM is a fitting solution for organization wide Intranet setups with multiple branches, departments and geographically distributed.

Mash Ups

Built in applications to integrate with several other popular information and knowledge sources; such as Bing, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Wikipedia etc.

Open Platform

No limit in number of users and knowledge content size and space.

Collaboration:

Message Box

Notifications

Wall

User Groups

Watch List

Alerts

Announcements

Wiki

Blog

Calendar

Aggregator (Blog content comes in one stream)

Instant Messaging

Project Management:

Time Sheets

Project Team Building

Project Task Management

Project repository management

Client Management (Manage Customers)

Brand Management (Manage Products/Brand)

Communities of Practice:

Communities (Listing) Expert Directory Idea Member of the week Memberships Recent colleagues Profile Summary Top Members User Groups Member Activities Invitations

Capability Paper

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Benefits

For Users

Reduces time required to complete knowledge intensive work

Increases “trust level” in information accuracy and timeliness

Eases burden on subject “experts” since users can get answers and guidance to their questions on a self-serve basis

For Administrators

Minimal resources required for ongoing maintenance as many tasks can be scheduled for automatic rule based execution

Security inherited from content source, so administrators do not have to worry about unauthorized users gaining access to sensitive information

Comprehensive toolkit for building, supervising and managing the Enterprise Portal

For Organizations

Improves ROI of knowledge asset management by reusing information instead of reinventing and searching for it

Reduces cost of retaining intellectual capital and transmitting it to new employees or successors

Quick and Easy installation and use across the enterprise

Based on full Open Source – Full ownership, no vendor lock-in

Social:

Social Account Management

Facebook

Linked In

Twitter

You Tube

Flicker

Twitter

Wall

Friends/Activities

Google Maps

Search:

Federated Search

Local Repository Search

Contextual Search

Administration:

Manage Applications

Sitemap

Control Panel

Layouts

Themes

WAP enabled

Mobile Support

Manage Apps

Manage Users

Account Registrations

INDIA OFFICE:InfoAxon Technologies Ltd.H-189, Sector-63, Electronic City, NODIA-201307, U.P IndiaPhone:+91 120 4350040, Fax:+ 91 120 4350065

UK OFFICE:InfoAxon Technologies UK Ltd.Building A, Trinity Court,Wokingham Road, Bracknell, Berkshire RG42 1PL, United KingdomPhone: +44 1344 668048, Fax: +44 1344 668148

Website: www.infoaxon.com | Blog: www.blog.infoaxon.com | E-mail: contactus@infoaxon.com

INDIA OFFICE: UK OFFICE:InfoAxon Technologies UK Ltd.Building A, Trinity Court,Wokingham Road, Bracknell, Berkshire RG42 1PL, United KingdomPhone: +44 1344 668048, Fax: +44 1344 668148

UK OFFICE:InfoAxon Technologies UK Ltd.Building A, Trinity Court,Wokingham Road, Bracknell, Berkshire RG42 1PL, United KingdomPhone: +44 1344 668048, Fax: +44 1344 668148

Website: www.infoaxon.com | m

UK OFFICE:

About InfoAxon Technologies

InfoAxon is a leading provider of enterprise services and business solutions powered by open source. We design; architect and support complete “Enterprise Solution Platforms” using Open Standards, Web 2.0 next generation technologies and Open Source Frameworks providing end-to-end solutions to business problems.

India’s First Global Open Source Integration CompanyWe are India's First Global Open Source Integration Company providingbusiness solutions in areas of Content & Knowledge Management, Web2.0 Collaboration and Business Intelligence powered by our unique open source ‘Platforming’ expertise.