Liferay Portal is an enterprise web platform for building business solutions. It has a framework that offers integrated Web publishing and content management, an enterprise service bus, and service-oriented architecture.

Liferay Portal is built around an open source portal framework, which makes it easy for developers to customize it for their organization based on their specific requirements. Although Liferay offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are actually required for basic website installation and administration.

Key features include:

• Content & document management with Microsoft Office® integration.
• Web publishing and shared workspaces.
• Enterprise collaboration.
• Social networking and mashups.
• Enterprise portals and identity management.
• Self-service portals.
• Enterprise application integration.
• Revenue-generating social networks.
• Knowledge sharing workspaces.
• Dynamic web 2.0 websites.
• Multi language support.

As Liferay Portal is open source, it has a large community of developers. This is an invaluable source of trouble shooting, code samples, tutorials, and add-ons, all of which are readily available. Liferay Portal is originally based upon the J2EE platform and is available on all leading application servers. It is compatible with all leading databases that run on Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X platforms.