Architecting Integrated Content Management Portal with Liferay

A decade before, organizations stepped up to revolutionize their processes. It was an era of websites and automation applications. To cater to the clients, organizations went for online building their online presence with e-commerce sites.  While process automation picked up buzz words like SCM, CMS, DMS, WCM, and ECM floating across all industries. IT companies continued the stride further to enhance these applications and website features.

Current Scenario

Organizations are now equipped with websites and applications generating useful data sets. However, expanding organization and data size pose serious challenges for IT teams. They are struggling to manage multiple applications, data channels and ultimately the data. If the data is not processed at the right time, the information system fails to present you with the necessary business intelligence. Overloaded with data, systems are unable to provide real-time data causing unnecessary delays. It is all the more embarrassing if you have to make customers wait because of slow response time! So primary challenges are: managing multiple applications, low response time while incurring high license cost of applications.

Recommended Solution

With capability to manage content throughout its life cycle, eliminate duplication, and increase content accuracy an Integrated Content Management Portal (ICMP) is an ideal solution. ICMP is a single portal architecture providing end-to-end solution for document collaboration and publishing.

Deploying Alfresco WCM at the back-end and Liferay as a Portal platform can deliver a powerful ICMP. Alfresco WCM acts as central repository with capabilities to manage, preview and publish content from other applications. Portals built on Liferay can be integrated to make highly manageable and maintainable portal environment. As content publishing cycles are condensed by connecting collaboration and publishing applications, the portal will always be prompt in providing real-time data.

Example of ICMP using Alfresco and Liferay via CIGNEX

Partnering with a Vendor

As Liferay is a user-friendly portal with many great features to explore, an experienced Liferay consultant can be very effective in driving the ICMP implementation. They can ensure to reduce dependencies for end users while getting simple, elegant and easy-to-use UI. A solid and seamless architecture is imperative in order to build an ICMP solution to create, manage, personalize, and deliver trusted content.

Partnering with leading open source vendor can be ideal for the recommended architecture especially in the implementation of open source platforms as Alfresco and Liferay. If you are evaluating ICMP solutions, you can check out an example of this architecture from CIGNEX Datamatics

Editor's Note: The author of this article is associated with CIGNEX Datamatics.