With the announce of their 2.0 release candidate, Liferay significantly widens the pool for opensource JSR168-compliant enterprise portal software ...

Liferay is a free open-source implementation of an
enterprise portal server similar to Jetspeed, WebSphere, Plumtree and Epicentric. It provides personalization features similar to Yahoo and a vast array of pre-built portlets such as Mail, News, Shopping Cart, Message Board, Wiki, and many more. All the portlets are JSR-168 compliant.

Liferay is licensed under an MIT opensource license and ships with JBoss/Tomcat, JBoss/Jetty or Orion. A full demo can be seen on my.liferay.com and the project development can be tracked on SourceForge

Besides, he's on a mission from God

[ Source: Liferay ]

WorldBank consultant John Daly's recent Development Gateway remarks on blogging are targetted to an audience in ICT for developing nations, his observations are just as apropos for any regional development project:

The potential of blogs for sustainable development has scarcely been tapped. Blogs provide a means by which individual citizens can speak out about what is happening in their countries, and with their governments. Blogging would seem to be a great tool for development project monitoring, helping to promote transparency in that process. Multi-user blogs would seem a great vehicle for e-learning, and for communities of practice to formulate and document their ideas.

The Development Gateway is also hosting a discussion forum on applications of social software to the DG projects.

[ Source: Blogging Feature (John Daly) ]

Every software installation needs to be mindful of its return, and this is no less true of intranets and portals because, well, these things are expensive investments. How we know our money is well spent, how we predict our returns is critical to knowing how much we're willing to spend to get the job done, and being able to weight the apples against the oranges is the final bottom line when it comes to choosing our software technologies.

One of the stickier choices of late is whether to jump on board traditional "Document Management System" corporate portal CMS, or to dare dip into the burgeoning world of the "Social Computing Network" paradigm; for the IT stewards unfamiliar with social networks, it can be a hard comparison.

Fortunately, John Robb has done the math for us. ROI calculations: K-Logs vs. traditional Intranet Portals is a thoughtful and conservative estimate of the relative ownership costs vs the returns for a 5000-seat corporate information ecosystem, done once from the traditional CMS view, and then done again in the new social computing k-log model.

Allow me to summarize:

Is it any wonder the demand for our social computing platforms like "Drupal": has soared in the past three months? If you ask me, though, I think his effective benefit on the k-log side is a tad low, but nonetheless ...

Check out John's website for the full breakdown; I don't imagine your mileage will vary that much. And as for the issue of costs associated with employees (and other system participants) losing 35% of their time in the hunt for information, John offers a follow-up article on information availability and the role of k-logs in sifting document spaces for what it is people really need to find.

[ Source: ROI calculations: K-Logs vs. traditional Intranet Portals
   see also: What is a k-log? ]