Best solution for intranet. Alfresco? Liferay.

[Riccardo Tacconi]

Hi guys,

I should develop and intranet with Java. I am a PHP developer with decent background in Java (university) but not commercial experience. I am developing a custom intranet in PHP but I should start to provide some demo of an intranet made in Java to anohter company. I have very few time to dedicate to the Java intranet, so I need something simple.

I have found that Alfresco and Liferay are two really Open Source option. I know that Alfresco is an ECM and Lifreray is a portal system, but I am quite confused. I seems to me that Liferay is quite complete as an intranet, Alfresco seems more feature rich but it should be customized a lot.

I know that Alfresco an Liferay can be integrated but as I said I need a simple solution. The requirements for the intranet are:

1. Create sections and publish articles there (news, head office, vacancies, help, internal news, etc).
2. possibility to set up access control per section and/or per file.
3. Poll.
4. Display the share price of the company stock price.
5. Display in a div three clocks with the US, France and UK time.
6. a list of aout ten mail links to internal and external web sites.
7. Set up a go-live and expiring time for the articles.

I do not need complex features, just to display some articles. So:

1. What is the difference between ECM and portlet?
2. Is it better Alfresco or Liferay for the over mentioned requirements?

Thanks in advance, regards,

Riccardo.

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

I'd go with Liferay.

-Cameron McKenzie

[Paras Jain]

Hi Riccardo,
Though both these technologies reign in different terrain, one is best in breed open source Portal and while other is best in breed open source ECM system, there is an overlap and thus little bit conflict of interest. Liferay has some technologies which allows you to do content management. On the other hand, lately Alfresco is offering some web technologies to interact with its core content management.
There are some frameworks which allows you to loosely integrate both of these systems and take advantages of the features provided in both of them.

See
http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/Crafter/Home
http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/Crafter/FAQ
http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/Crafter/FAQ

Regards,
Paras

[Riccardo Tacconi]

Thanks for your help guys. I will learn Liferay, is more Intranet ready and already has many features that I need.

[Ankur Srivastav]

Hi there.. I will say that Liferay is sufficient for all your requirements.

It has its own inbuilt CMS which can be used to publish articles and other types of content. Moreover it has all the features in the form of Pottlets.

[Riccardo Tacconi]

I have Liferay running on Solaris. I had not the time to learn Liferay but I will start soon. There is a very poor documentation for Solaris installation and I think it is better to run Liferay alone without any other web application in the same server.

[Riccardo Tacconi]

I should configure the mail for Liferay in webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-ext.properties

From a tutorial I copied the following properties:

mail.session.jndi.name=mail/MailSession
mail.session.mail.pop3.host=localhost
mail.session.mail.pop3.password=
mail.session.mail.pop3.port=110
mail.session.mail.pop3.user=
mail.session.mail.smtp.auth=false
mail.session.mail.smtp.host=localhost
mail.session.mail.smtp.password=
mail.session.mail.smtp.port=25
mail.session.mail.smtp.user=
mail.session.mail.store.protocol=pop3
mail.session.mail.transport.protocol=smtp

I get this error:

10:51:15,929 ERROR [MailSessionFactoryBean:67] Unable to lookup mail/MailSession
javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: Name mail is not bound in this Context

Since I am a java greenhorn... where can I find some info about configuring those parameters. I am using Tomcat.