Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Intranets -Book Review

Just to guide you on book   Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Intranets, whether what you are looking for is in there or not :)

Chapter 1:Introducing Liferay for your Intranet



This chapter describes what all you can do using Liferay, along with giving a glance on the standards that are followed in Liferay architecture.


1) Creation of Discussion boards

2) Wiki's for collaborative document's creation

3) Blog's for team and individuals: Where in team don't need to be technical, they can update the contents using WYSIWYG editors.

4) Document store for managing and publishing document;s with role based access control

5) Workflow to control document publishing

6) Integration of social office , social networking site's for better collaboration and one point view.

7) Shared calendar's.

8) SOA based support to integrate with other third party system and have single point of

access to all systems in a portal.



Chapter 2: Setting Up a Home Page and Navigation Structure for the Intranet


1) Setting up Liferay portal in windows / Linux environment with installation steps.

2) Setting up production environment, here the book talks about JVM parameters to be set up

for production environment but never explains why? or what those parameters mean.

3) Good explanation of portal.properties which can be extended for the customization of the portal, which gives an easy way for administrators to modify or have the customization done.

4) Describes the way of creating default database connections via JNDI and populating the DB with default data. The good thing that I found here is how to configure ""NULL IS NULL" check.

5) Describes the way to configure the mail's [SMTP/ IMAP /POP3] server.


There are description of portal.properties / portal-ext.properties. Somehow I miss a screenshot

of the directory structure when the portal is installed, so that I can easily map the file's with the structure that the text written indicates to.

Chapter 3: Bringing in users

This chapter talks about users accessing the built system and controlling their authentication and authorization as per the roles they perform in an organization.

This chapter details on:

1) Setting up an Organization and its sub-orginizations.

2) Adding /Modifying / Deleting Departments to the Organization

3) Adding /Modifying / Deleting locations to the organization / departments.

4) Associating users to the Organization / SubOrganization / Department / Location.

5) Key point to note while removing (deleting) any location /department is that you need to remove
   the associated users from there. Then only you will be able to delete them.

6) Describes the properties in portal.properties which define the above associations and properties.
   I was looking for a deep dive on these properties where in how should I be able to configure
   my organization and add some properties if possible by modifying the portal-ext.properties.  
   Short examples showing the modification shoule have been provided.

7) The chapter introduces the Shared Global space but dosent talks about it in detail. Hope to see the
   details on how to manage this space in details in other chapters.

8) Creating users to and adding them to groups. I was expecting screen shots for the same.

9) Managing users (Impersonating / update / Activate / Deactivate / Delete)and their profiles.

10) Connecting to LDAP and importing the users from there.

11) Authenticating user via SSO (CAS / NTLM /OpenID /OpenSSO /Siteminder), book describes the configurable portal properties.

12) Managing Roles in an organization and assigning members to those roles.

13) Assigning Portal and portlet level permissions.

Chapter 4:Forums , Categorization and Asset Publishing