Liferay has announced the 5.2 release of Liferay Portal Standard Edition. The open source solution integrates content management, collaboration, and social networking to help enterprises consolidate software investments. The latest release features enhanced performance and scalability for reduced hardware costs and simplified administration for greater reusability and adoption.

Customers that deployed Liferay Portal often deployed Liferay as a collaboration or content management solution, with plans to customize the product in future iterations to fit long-term business strategy. Savings result from Liferay's compatibility with an enterprise's existing application servers and databases, requiring no new investment in infrastructure software.

Liferay Portal 5.2 drives further value by helping enterprises maximize existing technology investments:

• Control Panel: A new control panel unifies portal administration in a single interface, simplifying deployment and management of multiple websites, team sites, intranets, and customer portals from a shared Liferay Portal infrastructure (multi-tenant portal)
• Microsoft Office integration: Users can continue to work from preferred productivity suites. Liferay implements the MS-DWSS SharePoint protocol to allow users to save and retrieve documents to and from Liferay Portal as if it were a SharePoint server
• Built-in web content management and a content integration framework: Allows users to aggregate and publish existing repository content with new content to create websites and collaborative workspaces (intranets, extranets, team sites)
• Improved Collaboration and Social Networking: Liferay's built-in suite of social computing tools now allows for multiple forums, wikis, blogs and document libraries to be created and matched to specific user groups or knowledge areas within the same site

Front and back end performance upgrades deliver speed and responsiveness to reduce processor, network and memory requirements:

• Back end performance improvements: Distribute read / write operations between two separate databases; data-bound applications benefit from increased database throughput, which maximizes the amount of data that the portal can serve.
• Front end performance improvements: JavaScript and CSS caching and new use of CSS Sprites yield significant increases in speed, allowing image-heavy pages to load faster.

Scalability and Reliability:

• Terracotta integration: Integration with open source clustering software for Java applications shortens development time and reduces the number of application servers and databases required to support Java infrastructures.
• New WSRP Implementation: Full WSRP1.0/2.0 specification support allows for portal publishing from remote servers and gives organizations the flexibility of shifting operations geographically as needed.