Liferay

I had the privileged of reviewing Liferay Portal for CMS-Connected's "In the Spotlight" segment. This is the first time, I've done a show with new co-host Butch Stearns. The end result is what I think is a great question and answer review of Liferay's products followed by Scott Liewehr's analyst perspective of Liferay the company. In the show, I talked about Liferay Portal and Liferay Social Office. I also had a chance to briefly mention Liferay Sync.

For a second year in a row, I along with CMS Report was invited to cover Liferay's North America Symposium which is being held this year in San Francisco. During this morning's keynote speech by Bryan Cheung, Liferay CEO and founder, I couldn't walk away from the presentation without recognizing the difference a year can make for one company. Something has changed for Liferay and the many partners and associated vendors that are represented here at this conference. Liferay has grown up, people are ready to talk business, and they're once again ready to talk about the importance of open source and community which makes this all happen.

A couple weeks ago, Liferay's marketing and communication folks sent me an email mentioning that Liferay was included as a "Leader" in Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. After my usual procrastination I finally got around to reading the report and what follows in this blog post are some impressions that jumped at me while reading the report. I'm not convinced the randomness of these personal thoughts make up a blog post (at least a well-written blog post) but I'm going for it since my public note taking often turns out better than a well polished article.

As I mentioned last month, this week the 2011 Liferay West Coast Symposium takes place. I'm excited to attend this conference as when it comes to Liferay, I'm definitely a newbie and this is a great opportunity for CMS Report to focus and learn more about Liferay. During this conference, Liferay is scheduled to announce the details for Liferay Portal 6.1 as well as their new Marketplace. I'm really interested to see how the Liferay community responds to the anticipated new features as well as their participation and role in interacting with the developers.