Liferay Teams With Alfresco And Virtuas To Provide Performance, Value, Choice in Enterprise Software.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Companies Work to Integrate Liferay Portal with Alfresco Enterprise Content Management and with Geronimo Application Server; Results to be Showcased at JavaOne

Liferay, provider of the leading enterprise-class open source portal platform, today announced the pending release of a bundled version of Liferay Portal with Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Suite, as well as a new partnership with Colorado-based Virtuas Open Source Solutions, LLC, to certify Liferay Portal on the Geronimo open-source application server. With these two initiatives, enterprises will have more choices and derive even greater performance and value when using Liferay for their portal installations.

The announcement, made at Sun Microsystems' 2006 JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, comes on the heels of the release of Liferay Portal 4.0, which will be in final release by the end of May.

An Excellent Portal-Based ECM Solution

Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) available today. Started by Documentum co-founder John Newton and former COO of Business Objects John Powell, Alfresco is built with a full SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) using many of the same technologies and standards as Liferay Portal, including Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, MyFaces, JSR 168, JSR 170, and Web Services. Features include a sophisticated administration system, CIFS and WebDAV support, drag and drop content folders, taxonomy, library services, automatic content transformation (file-type conversion), and customizable workflow while delivering unparalleled performance and scalability with support for clustering and failover.

"The Liferay Portal-Alfresco bundle delivers a tightly integrated Portal + ECM solution that leverages the synergy between the two products," said Brian Chan, founder and chief software architect of Liferay. "Liferay Portal and Alfresco share important features that provide for close cooperation between the two: J2EE, SOA, high availability and scalability, security and SSO, and fine-grained permissions. And Liferay's web publishing, delegable administration, themes, bundled portlets, and 700+ deployment configurations provide Alfresco's excellent ECM feature set with a portal platform that amplifies its value."

"We are committed to providing customers with a choice when deploying their Alfresco solutions in a portal environment, " said John Newton, founder and CTO of Alfresco. "Both Alfresco and Liferay are dedicated to open source and open standards allowing customers maximum flexibility. An Alfresco-Liferay bundle is an out-of-the-box solution alleviating the need for customers to have to integrate the two solutions on their own."

Another Application Server Alternative

In addition, Liferay has teamed with Virtuas to optimize Liferay's compatibility with the Apache Geronimo open-source application server. Virtuas, founded in 1999, is led by a team of experienced open-source leaders that have committed code to various Apache Software Foundation projects, authored books on open-source technologies, and worked in leading open source roles for organizations such as VA Linux and HP. As the premier provider of professional services and support surrounding Apache Geronimo and other leading open-source technologies, Virtuas' expertise is enabling seamless integration of Liferay and Geronimo. Liferay has also joined Virtuas, IBM, AMD, MySQL, Alfresco and others in co-sponsoring Geronimo Live!, an event at JavaOne showcasing the support and synergy forming around Geronimo.

"We see a lot of potential for Geronimo and want to be sure that Liferay stays ahead of the curve with the best of the new technologies out there," Chan said. "Virtuas' team has an intimate knowledge of Geronimo and they strongly believe Liferay is the best open source portal available, so we naturally partnered with them to get the two products working together. The fact that Liferay and Alfresco are supporting Virtuas' Geronimo Live! event shows the synergy is just going to get stronger among these products."

"As customers move towards open source 'up the stack' at the application level, the need for 'best-of-breed' partnerships to integrate these applications with open source middleware will continue to grow," said Matt Filios, Founder and President of Virtuas. "Virtuas is pleased to work with Liferay and Alfresco to offer enterprise customers with such a trusted end-to-end open source solution."

New Capabilities

Liferay Portal continues to offer the best combination of performance and value in the portal market. On top of its enterprise-class service-oriented architecture (SOA) with high availability, clustering and failover capabilities, Liferay Portal offers compatibility with JBoss JEMS, BEA WebLogic Platform, IBM WebSphere, Oracle and more to help protect organizations' IT investments. An integrated web publishing CMS, large number of bundled portlets, EJB or servlet flexibility, liberal open source license, and standards compliance round out the package to deliver tremendous value.

Version 4.0 of Liferay Portal adds enhanced security including portlet-level permissioning, enterprise-level taxonomies, public/private pages, full-page caching for static content, and real-time style editing. Further enhancements across the board include performance improvements, improved user experience and a refactored portlet suite. Version 4.0 also supports JSR-170 via Jackrabbit integration.

Now On Display

Liferay's new Liferay Portal-Alfresco bundle will be available shortly in both the Professional and Enterprise editions of Liferay Portal. The Liferay Apache Geronimo certification is also expected to be completed by the end of May.

Prototypes of the Liferay Portal-Alfresco integration, as well as an early release of Liferay running on Geronimo, will be demonstrated at JavaOne at the Liferay exhibit, Booth 935 at Moscone Center. For more information, including download options, go to www.liferay.com.

About Virtuas Open Source Solutions, LLC

Virtuas Open Source Solutions is the premier provider of enterprise-level support services for widely-adopted open source software such as Apache Geronimo, Tomcat, Spring and Hibernate. Since 1999, Virtuas has provided the Global 2000 with world-class enterprise software solutions. For more information about Virtuas, please visit www.virtuas.com.

About Alfresco

Alfresco Software Inc. is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It is the first company to bring the power of open source to the enterprise content management market, enabling unprecedented scale and a much lower total cost of ownership than proprietary systems. Founded by a team of content management veterans that includes the co-founder of Documentum, John Newton, and former COO of Business Objects, John Powell, Alfresco is based in London. For more information, visit www.alfresco.com.

About Liferay

Liferay is leading innovation, performance and value in the portal market with Version 4.0 of Liferay Portal, which features an Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture, liberal open source license, and integration with the best of today's technologies. To complement this offering Liferay provides a full suite of 24/7 support, product training, and professional consulting services. Liferay's corporate philosophy emphasizes a philanthropic spirit through work with and financial support of respected non-profit organizations such as Goodwill Industries and World Vision. The privately-held company is headquartered in Los Angeles. For more information about Liferay, please visit www.liferay.com.