We have explored many of the portlets in Liferay’s collaboration suite. You have seen how you can configure all of the portlets in a similar fashion using a unified user interface. After this, we went over all of the portlets in succession.
The Blogs and Blogs Aggregation portlets can be used to manage shared blogs or blogs belonging to a group of people at once. These portlets have all the features you would want in a blog, including rich text editing, links to news aggregators, tags, RSS feeds, and more.
The Calendar portlet likewise can be used to manage a shared calendar or a group calendar. It includes features for events, event notification, repeatable events, and import and export to and from the standard iCalendar format.
Discussion becomes easy with Liferay’s Message Boards portlet. This portlet can be used to manage heavily trafficked discussion forums with ease. It inherits all of the security features of the Liferay platform and includes administrative functions for thread priorities, moving threads, nested discussion categories, banning users, and more.
Liferay’s Wiki portlet is a state of the art wiki application that users can make use of to collaborate on web pages. Again, it inherits the strengths of the Liferay platform in the form of security, interface, and search. You can use the wiki portlet to manage several wiki nodes or use many wiki portlets to manage one node each.
The Polls portlet is a fun way to interact with users of your site to get an understanding of what they’re thinking at any given time. It allows you to create multiple choice polls that keep track of the votes and display results on the page. You can view these results in a number of ways, including charts.
Liferay provides a chat solution for your portal that’s very easy to use. It allows logged-in users to see who else is logged in to the portal and view their status. Users can go invisible if they don’t want others to know that they’re online. Users can chat with each other via instant messages. You can also set up a Jabber chat server and configure Liferay to use it; this allows users who have logged in to your portal via their browsers to chat with users using traditional desktop clients.
Integrating mail with your portal is easy with the Mail portlet. You can add as many custom or Gmail mail accounts as you wish, and this portlet can keep them all organized in one place, together with the rest of the things Liferay is aggregating for you.
Liferay’s collaboration platform is a full suite of integrated applications that empower users to work together. You can use them to great effect to enhance your portal and to build a vibrant, active community.