Liferay WCS: Dana Blankenhorn and the History of Open Source

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Dana Blakenhorn is one of the keynote speakers here at Liferay West Coast Symposium. He's probably one of the most non-Liferay speakers at this symposium giving him the perfect opportunity to express new ideas to this community of Liferay developers, partners, and users. I love these "strength of weak-ties" guests in conferences as it allows for some people in this crowd to "get it" and run with it.

The description for his talk:

The History of Open Source
(Dana Blankenhorn, Open Source Journalist, Freelancer)
Open source is as American as pumpkin pie. It is shared infrastructure. It is how we advance when no one actor can build what must be built. In this slide presentation, Dana Blankenhorn introduces you to the people, and concepts, that make open source what it is, from cavemen to the Cloud.

 

Dana Lakenhorn at the Liferay West Coast Symposium

Some of Dana's most significant points that I'm taking away with this conference:

Liferay Marketplace and Liferay Portal 6.1

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Here at the Liferay West Coast Symposium, Bryan Cheung (CEO) and Paul Hinz (CMO) just announced the newest and upcoming version of the company’s Liferay Portal 6.1, as well as the developer community release of the new Liferay Marketplace. Liferay, Inc. hopes these moves represents a showing of strong new convergence of portal, web content management and modular applications for Liferay products.

Bryan Cheung presenting at Liferay WCS 2011

Personally, my focus in this article was going to be soley on Liferay Portal 6.1 but after talking to some of Liferay's partners and users, I've been convinced that the Marketplace is going to be a big deal for almost everyone involved with Liferay. The goal of the marketplace is to not only build better apps for the end user but also to "get everyone to share" among the community. Below you'll find discussion on the Liferay Marketplace and in the second section discussion of new features found in Liferay Portal 6.1.

Liferay Marketplace

Liferay Marketplace provides Liferay’s worldwide community of developers and partners a channel for selling applications and plugins to Liferay’s nearly 1 million installations worldwide (yea, that's a big number).  First previewed at the Liferay East Coast Symposium in May, Marketplace hits the first phase of its launch at the West Coast Symposium with a developer-ready release, which includes a system developer kit for app development.

Live at the 2011 Liferay West Coast Symposium

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Submitted by Bryan on

As I mentioned last month, this week the 2011 Liferay West Coast Symposium takes place. I'm excited to attend this conference as when it comes to Liferay, I'm definately a newbie and this is a great opportunity for CMS Report to focus and learn more about Liferay. During this conference, Liferay is scheduled to announce the details for Liferay Portal 6.1 as well as their new Marketplace. I'm really interested to see how the Liferay community responds to the anticipated new features as well as their participation and role in interacting with the developers.

Liferay LogoLast night, I had the privliedge of attending dinner with many of the Liferay executives and employees as well as some of their partners. At my table, I sat with Brian Chan along with some very knowledgable Liferay users including Mike Vertal, President and CEO of Rivet Logic and a developer from TandemSeven. We had some very interesting discussions regarding system integration as well as user integration. I found myself interested in how many of the Liferay people here integrate their portal with Alfresco causing me to not only appreciate Liferay but also finding some new found respect for Alfresco. Given the amount of smart people here...I can't help but believe this is going to be a really great symposium.

The 2011 Liferay West Coast Symposium

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Submitted by Bryan on

Over the past few years, I've heard a lot of good things about Liferay and their flagship product, Liferay Portal. The portal is an open source enterprise solution for portals, publishing, content, and collaboration. However, I must confess, beyond the demo and some positive word-of-mouth comments, I haven't had much chance to explore their products, services, and community behind the product. My lack of knowledge about Liferay is all going to change next month, because CMS Report will be at this year's Liferay West Coast Symposium in Anaheim, California.

Liferay recently announced their keynote speaker and the agenda is starting to shape up quite nicely. For those that are interested in attending the symposium, I've attached their latest press release on the symposium below. Early bird registration ends August 20th, so I wouldn't hesitate in registring for the symposium if you plan on attending this year.

Industry Experts Lead Discussions at Liferay West Coast Symposium

Leading open source portal provider to present talks from Liferay executives, engineers and a veteran Internet journalist.

LOS ANGELES--(PRWeb)--Liferay, Inc., provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, announced today the speakers for its 5th annual West Coast Symposium (WCS) in Anaheim, CA on September 21-22, including a special keynote by seasoned technology and open source writer Dana Blankenhorn. The symposium will feature talks from Liferay’s executives and the company’s core product engineering team, who will be debuting the new Liferay Portal 6.1EE and Liferay Marketplace at the open-source industry event.