Portal News & Articles

The Intranet is dead! Long live the Intranet! ...so the refrain goes.

The promise of the Intranet was that it was going to liberate content and spread the wealth locked inside information repositories, closed networks, siloed file systems and even physical file cabinets. In many ways Intranets -- when done well -- have improved life behind the firewall.

However, we are far from the holy grail.

A Forrester Research survey found that just 43% of enterprise employees access an intranet every day. Worse, 35% don’t even use their intranet on a monthly basis.

The fact is that Intranet promises have not been fully realized, and this is exactly where the power of social comes in.

Social Intranets - The Promise

Social Business technology supplies the essential functionality missing from conventional intranets and turns them into the dynamic collaborative environments known as social intranets.

The promise of Social Intranets is to build on the successes of the original Intranet vision, but add these benefits:

• Open up content creation and curation to the full enterprise, leveraging the wisdom of the crowd
• Break down the walls between people, groups and departments via tools as simple as the @joesmith reference.
• Utilize internal social graph intelligence to enhance the relevancy of the intranet experience, improve search results and reduce the time to task completion
• Efficiently capture ideas and harness the innate innovation found in your workforce, leading to a more robust and streamlined ideation process

To learn more about how these benefits are being realized in practice, you can join the upcoming social intranet panel discussion on May 30th (live and online).

Infographic -- The Benefits of a Social Intranet

Join the Social Intranet Best Practices Panel Discusion

On May 30th you can join in for a live, online panel discussion focused on current trends and best practices for designing, implementing and succeeding with a Social Intranet.

Panel members include:

• Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group will discuss at a high level, the latest industry research and trends on how leading companies are revamping dusty, soul-sucking intranets, and giving employees a social, collaborative, engaging experience that drives productivity, fosters innovation, and yields staggering results.
• Tyson Cornell of PricewaterhouseCoopers will dig a level deeper, into the strategies and processes that global enterprises are using to deploy Social Business Software -- both to drive business transformation, and to add value to existing communication and information infrastructures.
• Tiffany LaBanca and Kristen Ritter of News Corporation will round out the panel, sharing a case study of how their company is becoming a social-powered organization. News Corporation's OurNews Social Business Network is changing the way the company communicates, collaborates, and innovates -- connecting more than 50 businesses and 15,000 employees on a unified global platform.

If social intranet success is your curiosity or mandate, sign-up for the online panel discussion here. 

This article was sponsored by Jive Software.

Open source portal provider Liferay has released a new version of its enterprise portal, Liferay Portal 6.1 Enterprise Edition (EE). The latest release features several usability enhancements and multiple improvements to empower end users to create content and automate process without engaging a developer.

Taking a page from Dropbox and other document sharing services, Liferay announced today a new document sharing add-on for the community edition of its enterprise portal. The add-on, Liferay Sync, allows users to access documents stored in Liferay from their desktop or mobile device.

eXo has released the latest version of its open source portal, eXo 3.5. The release has lots of new features, but the big news may be the portal’s journey to the cloud.

If you were wondering if growth and interest in open source was just hype, Liferay provided a little additional evidence today that open source is thriving. The open source portal maker has announced its community expanded to 56,000 members in 2011 -- an almost 40% increase over the previous year.

Open source portal provider Liferay has finally released the latest version of its platform, version 6.1 Community Edition. We were able to see a preview of 6.1 at the Liferay West Coast Symposium back in September, and the official release did not disappoint.

Several articles have recently proclaimed the intranet is dead. In an age of activity streams, mobile communications and other forms of fast-moving dialogue, do intranets remain relevant? Analyst firm Forrester Research has released a new report, Intranet Portals: Workforce Technology Adoption 2011, that provides some insight into that question.

Trying to be the single solution for all things customer experience (CXM) is a fool's errand. Smart software vendors know this and are building their products and data for ease of integration.

But beyond the lofty goals of CXM, integration opens product lifecycle horizons by allowing software to automatically evolve as the integrated tools evolve. This is worth reflecting on.

In an up-coming webinar on Wednesday November 9th, Melissa Webster, VP of Content & Digital Media at IDC, will look at how Web CMS integration strategies are impacting the lives of digital marketers and content managers.

During this event you will:

• Learn about current Customer Experience and Web Experience market trends 
• Discuss the latest integration possibilities with portals, cloud and customer experience tools
• See examples of SAP, IBM, Liferay, SharePoint integrations
• See examples of 3rd party app integration via an AppCenter framework for Web CMS

Don't miss this valuable opportunity for a quick scan of the Customer Experience space and the lowdown on how integration can directly impact your bottom line. Register here for the event.

Gartner has updated its magic quadrant for horizontal portals and there are some notable changes from the previous version. Much of the change is related to organizations embracing Enterprise 2.0 concepts in an attempt to deepen user engagement. This signals the first expansion in a long time of the number of platform options as vendors strive to meet the demands of enterprises seeking new innovative solutions.

On the second day of the Liferay West Coast Symposium, held in Anaheim, Calif., hundreds of attendees had a busy day, from dozens of sessions focused on strategy and implementation with the open-source enterprise portal.

The economy may be swirling around the drain, but revenues are rosy for Liferay (news, site), a provider of open source portal and enterprise collaboration software. The company announced 50 percent growth in revenue for its core business in the last twelve months.

Enterprise open source portal provider Liferay (news, site) has announced improved support for globalization; the company's portal is being translated to over 40 languages.

The idea that the web content management (WCM) and portal markets will converge is frequently discussed. One repository, a single administrative toolset, a seamless user experience -- these are the results of a combined platform. The upcoming version of the open source content management solution, Jahia, is designed with this composite model in mind.

In fact, Jahia 6.5, provides a composite content platform based on the most mature Java open source frameworks. It leverages well known standards such as JSR168/286, JSR170/283, OpenSocial, OpenSearch, and many popular open source libraries like Apache Jackrabbit, Apache Lucene/Solr, JBoss BPM and many more.

This new framework is modular, so you can easily customize and extend your solution. Add to this the new Japhia Studio to quickly design solutions without writing a line of code, and you have a rich, extensive platform to build your website and web applications.

Want to know more? Jahia is running a webinar tomorrow May 17 at 8am PST / 11am EST / 17:00 CET entitled  Discover Jahia 6.5: Create and Customize your Applications in a Breeze. In it you will learn all about:

• Platform Modularity: The New jahia combines PHP like modularity with Java strength for maximum development velocity
• Speed: The new Jahia lets you create compelling user experience with zero code composition
• Customization: build your own Composite Content Applications for any type of web initiatives

Tune in tomorrow to learn all that Jahia 6.5 has to offer: Register here.

Most intranets are not seen as essential to the functioning of an organization. This is because management is not convinced of their strategic value.

Welcome to the May 2011 installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month. If you feel that your project was left out, we invite you to email us at pr@cmswire.com to have a project representative added to the list of people we contact for updates.