Liferay Portal's flexibility allows it to be deployed in a number of different scenarios to meet key business needs. The following are just a few ways that Liferay Portal is being used:

• Corporate Extranet
• Company Intranet
• Content Management & Web Publishing
• Collaboration
• Infrastructure Portal

Corporate Extranet

Liferay Portal helps organizations create secure client- or partner-facing websites ("extranets").

For example, a supplier of aftermarket automobile parts may work with several retail resellers that need to access the company's inventory to order parts and check shipment status. Liferay makes it easy to manage each reseller's access rights, content, and functionality, and quickly create branded extranets for new resellers.

Extranet Story: EducaMadrid, the Madrid school system (500,000+ students across 1,600 schools), implemented Liferay as its framework application for an extranet of educational websites.

Company Intranet

Liferay Portal provides the tools needed to give your people secure access to senstive company information and applications. Liferay not only helps you manage groups within your organization (ie, executives, marketing, human resources), it also ensures that individuals within those groups only see what they're allowed to see. Meanwhile, a Liferay administrator can get applications and content to the whole portal community quickly and easily without having to maintain several different sites.

Intranet Story: Goodwill Industries used Liferay to build its intranet site, MyGoodwill, to create a landmark organizational tool that enabled thousands of staff worldwide to collaborate, share best practices, and engage in real-time learning.

Content Management & Web Publishing

The ever increasing volume of digital content we deal with on a daily basis makes effective content management systems (CMS) a vital part of any organization. In fact, content management is a natural fit for a portal because of the need for secure access and permissions (ie, who should be able to delete a document from the system?), distinct roles (writer, editor, designer, adminstrator), and workflow (edit, approve, publish).

Document management is also more effective when repositories can be assigned to different departments and groups within the company.

CMS/Web Publishing Story: The Christian Science Monitor used Liferay to deliver a more dynamic and interactive user experience for its online news site, streamline its behind-the-scenes publishing process, and better control work flow.

CMS/Web Publishing Story: Pantech, the seventh largest handset manufacturer in the world, chose Liferay to build its US & Canadian websites to quickly adapt to the existing look & feel of its branding and provide language localization into Spanish and French.

Collaboration

The internet enables individuals to collaborate in unprecedented ways, and Web 2.0-style websites have pushed the possibilities even further. But in an enterprise environment, the boundless capacity to share and publish information must be governed by the roles, permissions, and security considerations unique to each user and department.

Liferay Portal helps organize the potential chaos of an unfettered Web 2.0 environment by empowering users with tools such as tagging, blogs, instant email, message boards, and instant messaging within a secure, administrated framework. Liferay gives administrators ultimate control over what people can do, through tools like tags administration, fine-grained permissions, delegable administrator privileges, enterprise taxonomy, and ad-hoc user groups. 

Collaboration Story: The French Armaments Procurement Agency (DGA) leverages Liferay Portal's framework  and collaboration suite to run its "Espace Partenaire” collaborative Platform (EPNG) for the French defense community...

Infrastructure Portal

One of the key uses of a portal is to serve as a framework for aggregating content and applications. The right tools and software will make it easy for developers to make new and existing enterprise applications available  in the  secure, manageable framework that a portal provides.

Liferay Portal offers comprehensive tools to help developers integrate enterprise assets with an integrated enterprise service bus (ESB), workflow engine, web services support (ie, SOAP, JSON, REST), and developer tools such as Liferay's Eclipse plug-in manager and Liferay Service Builder.

Liferay's Content Interaction API is designed to create a unified interface for working with content in Liferay Portal regardless of source. Users can manage and publish content from third-party systems like Alfresco, Magnolia, Microsoft Sharepoint, or Vignette with the same interface used for Liferay's built-in content managment system (CMS).