Liferay’s annual West Coast Symposium (WCS) starts today in Anaheim, CA, and offers two full days of thought-provoking, eye-opening sessions that showcase interesting ways companies have used the Liferay platform to meet their business goals. The highly anticipated Liferay Portal 6.1 and Marketplace will also be announced at this year’s WCS.

As a Liferay Platinum Partner, Rivet Logic will be participating as a Diamond Sponsor. In addition to our main booth, our solution showcase will demonstrate our Team Beachbody case study. We will also be presenting a business track featuring a Sensus case study.

If you’re attending WCS, stop by and visit our booth!

Since becoming a Liferay partner in 2006, we have worked closely with Liferay and have seen the product mature over the years. So its increased adoption by enterprises worldwide comes as no surprise as the product’s numerous benefits are being realized. Recently, Liferay named Rivet Logic a Platinum Partner after a significant year of growth in sales and new implementations of Liferay in 2010.

“Enterprises dealing with content management and collaboration strategies are looking for best-of-breed tools as well as thought leaders who can guide them through critical decision points during the purchasing, development, and deployment cycles,” said Bryan Cheung, Liferay’s Chief Executive Officer. “Liferay provides a fantastic platform for developing web content and collaboration solutions, and Rivet Logic has become an industry thought leader in the development of these sophisticated solutions. With some of the largest deployments worldwide, Rivet Logic has earned its position as a Liferay Platinum partner and we look forward to their future success and partnership.”

We’re honored to become a Liferay Platinum Partner and will continue to deliver high-quality Liferay-based solutions to our customers while remaining active in the broader Liferay community!

Next up is the Liferay West Coast Symposium held on September 21-22 in Anaheim, CA.

Liferay is hosting its third annual East Coast Symposium (ECS) in the greater DC metropolitan area this year, which will take place at The National Conference Center in Leesburg, Virginia on May 10-11, 2011. Since the beginning, Rivet Logic has been actively involved when we co-hosted the first Symposium at our facilities in Reston, Virginia. Since then, ECS has grown exponentially each year, to which is now a full scale conference.

This year’s theme is The Liferay Platform, focusing on the release of Liferay Portal 6EE and its expansion, with session topics that address the expanded role of the Liferay Platform as a basis for the next generation of Web applications and services. The agenda will be filled with thought-provoking, eye-opening sessions that showcase interesting ways companies have used the Liferay Platform to meet their business needs.

Rivet Logic will be participating this year as a Diamond Sponsor and will feature a speaker presentation on how Liferay can be used to build and deploy a global intranet solution during one of sessions. In addition, we will be hosting the Education Solution Showcase, where we will demonstrate a uPortal to Liferay migration.

The Symposium is a great opportunity for anyone interested in or already using Liferay to learn, share knowledge, and network with like-minded individuals. For more information about the Symposium, please visit http://www.liferay.com/events/liferay-symposiums/east-coast-2011.

We hope to see you there!

Liferay’s annual West Coast Symposium is being held next week on September 8-9, 2010. One of the anticipated events is the debut of Liferay Portal 6EE, which will be broadcasted live for those who can’t attend the conference.

As part of the Liferay 6 launch activities, Liferay will also showcase a new feature in Liferay 6 each day starting on 8/31. Liferay is also hosting a series of worldwide roadshows with their partners to further drive product awareness.

Rivet Logic will be participating as a sponsor at the West Coast Symposium and hosting the Reston, VA roadshow at our facilities on September 24th.

We hope to see you at one of the events!

The topic of Liferay and Alfresco integration continues to be popular among portal developers and what we’ve seen is that in the last year both products have matured in important ways to enable better integration. This evolution also opens the door for more possibilities. And as we all know, with more options there is more confusion. From my readings on the Liferay and Alfresco forums I observe that there are two main issues that puzzle people when they’re thinking about integrating Liferay and Alfresco:
What are the different possible ways for me to integrate the two products?
Which approach should I use?

To help answer these questions I thought it might be useful to list what the current options for integration are as well as a brief description of the architectural implications of each.

Note that the type of integration I’m referring to here is between Liferay Portal and Alfresco’s Document Management (DM) repository, and not the Web Content Management (WCM) repository.

Option #1: Using the Web script Container
With this approach you would basically deploy Alfresco’s Web script container into Liferay as a portlet application. Your Web scripts would be deployed along with the container and will be fully executed within the Liferay Portal context. What’s new here is that authentication between the Web scripts running in the container and the Alfresco repository will be taken care of automatically. This is nice since it alleviates the need to deploy the entire Alfresco WAR file into the portal as was the case with Alfresco versions prior to 3.2.

That said you should keep in mind that (for now) to accomplish this you would need to deploy the Alfresco Share WAR file in its entirety into the Liferay portal. It should be mentioned though that according to Will Abson’s blog post about the subject this is expected to change with the reduction of the needed WAR file’s footprint. Also, the portlet still needs some work to make it configurable from the Liferay Portal UI using portlet preferences — but I gather that this will be implemented eventually as well.

Option #2: Alfresco Web script Portlet rivet
Another option is Rivet Logic’s Alfresco Web script Portlet rivet (AWPr). This portlet is pretty much an Alfresco Web script proxy. With the help of a custom Alfresco authentication component known as STAr (Secure Token Authentication rivet), an AWPr portlet instance will use a series of Java HTTP Client calls to RESTfully and securely retrieve the rendered contents of a single Web script, proxy the contents so that all URLs are valid portal URLs (e.g. action URLs, serve resource URLs for downloads, etc.), and render the updated content in the portlet’s render phase.

AWPr has a very small footprint and thus can safely be used heavily on one Liferay portal page; meaning that a single portal page can have multiple instances of AWPr each configured to proxy a different Web script without much performance impact on the Liferay instance. Keep in mind that it is a proxy so the content is being transferred from Alfresco to Liferay and then from Liferay to the client browser, which might have some cost implications if bandwidth is not cheap and the Web script generated markup is large.

Options #3: Custom Portlet Development
For those of us who need to build their own custom portlets and need to have access to the Alfresco DM repository APIs from within their portlet code in order to perform certain ECMS functionality, there are a number of options.

CMIS
Recently, Alfresco, IBM, Microsoft, Documentum and others announced the submission of a new content management standard proposal called “CMIS” or “Content Management Interoperability Service” and on May 1st, 2010, the OASIS standards body approved CMIS v1.0 as an official OASIS Specification.

Alfresco has released a full implementation of CMIS v1.0, which includes support for both RESTful AtomPub and Web Services bindings. This basically allows Liferay portlet developers to use either one of those interfaces to communicate directly with the Alfresco repository (and any other content management system that supports the CMIS specification). More details on Alfresco’s CMIS support may be found at: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/CMIS

RAAr
Another recently available option is presented by Rivet Logic’s Remote Alfresco API rivet (also referred to as RAAr). This API is a Java API that uses REST calls to communicate with a remote Alfresco repository. The advantage of this approach is that it provides all the pros of Alfresco’s Web services API but does not carry the burden of the SOAP stack — thus making it an attractive option for Java portlet developers.

RAAr is open source and is currently maintained by Rivet Logic Corporation. It provides most (if not all) of the Alfresco Foundation Service methods and can basically be used to do anything that the Alfresco web client can do.

More information about RAAr can be found at: http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/RAAr

Custom API
Even though it doesn’t really make much sense to do this I’m including this option just to be thorough. The idea here is that if you want to develop against Alfresoc’s REST API but want to abstract it using your own API you can do so. The problem with this approach is that depending on the problem you’re trying to solve you’ll eventually end up writing a CMIS API if you want to be platform independent (mostly) or RAAr if you want to access Alfresco’s service layer APIs remotely. So unless you have a legitimate reason to go down this road it’s most probably going to be better for you in the long run to stick with CMIS or RAAr.

This pretty much covers the options available for integrating Liferay with Alfresco’s DM repository. To know which options suites you best, you should weigh the features and drawbacks of each until you find a good fit, and with enough projects, making the right choice will start to become more obvious.

We recently released a new case study, Team Beachbody: A Large-Scale Social Community Platform Built on the Open Source Liferay Portal, which highlights how Rivet Logic utilized Liferay Portal to build a revenue-generating social network for Product Partners and the business benefits derived from the solution.

Product Partners, LLC, an exercise and nutrition market leader, launched the Team Beachbody program as a membership-based online support community that offers a wide array of fitness programs. In order to generate revenue growth, Product Partners decided to harness the existing community around its products and combine it with the power of social networking to turn the site into a revenue generating resource. By offering active community members a percentage of sales of Beachbody products that they refer to new members, it encourages increased community participation.

Liferay Portal was selected as the development platform for its flexibility and scalability to cater to evolving business requirements and future growth, as well as its low total cost of ownership. Rivet Logic was chosen as the system integrator to implement the solution, and in particular, the WOWY SuperGym application, a featured element of the overall Team Beachbody experience. The WOWY SuperGym application has resulted in stronger customer loyalty and recurring revenue opportunities through a set of social collaboration features that encourage use and membership retention.

Click here to download the full case study.

This year, BIZcon Europe 2010, hosted by Ricston, will be held in Malta on March 4th and 5th. BIZcon is all about informing business leaders about significant trends and developments in business, and interestingly, the theme this year will be “Understanding and Leveraging Open Source”.

While many business executives are familiar with the term open source, not many have a clear understanding of how open source can be used and integrated into their organization’s environment, and more importantly, the value that can be gained compared to traditional proprietary solutions. As open source continues to gain traction, it’s important to keep business executives informed so that open source can be effectively incorporated into their strategy and leveraged to deliver bottom line results.

The agenda includes presentations from various business executives and leaders in open source, including Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung.

Alfresco just selected Rivet Logic as the winner of their Americas Partner of the Quarter Award.

Alfresco Partner of the Quarter, Q2 2009 - Rivet Logic

We’re truly honored to be recognized again by Alfresco for our accomplishments. Over the past year, we’ve continued to see strong demand for our Alfresco consulting services as more and more organizations are becoming more liberal towards the idea of open source. Last quarter, we kicked off several new Alfresco projects in a variety of sectors - including higher ed, media/publishing, technology and non-profit.

We look forward to continuing our work with major enterprises, and contributing back to the Alfresco community.

Last week was Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. We participated as a sponsor of JBoss World and also gave a few presentations during the breakout sessions. Below are some highlights from our trip:

JBoss World at the downtown Chicago Hilton:

 

Our booth at the partner pavilion:

 

Museum of Science & Industry party:

 

Closing ceremony:

 

Although we didn’t walk away with the overall JBoss Innovator of the Year Award, we still have our category award for Optimized Systems to display in our trophy case….

Until next year!!

This year, Rivet Logic will be hosting Liferay’s first ever East Coast User Conference, taking place on 5/21, at our training facilities in Reston, VA. It would be an opportunity to meet some of the faces behind Liferay in person while discussing the product’s future as well as best practices.

The agenda includes keynote speakers and both technical and business tracks to cover a variety of topics. Technical tracks include “Liferay Solutions, SaaS Style” and “Social Networking with Liferay, ICEfaces, and Vizster”, while business tracks include “Enterprise Collaboration: Overcoming Issues with Big Implementations” and “Fostering Open Source Adoption Within Reluctant Enterprises”.

We are pleased to host this event and look forward to further involvement with future Liferay events.