Life is treating Liferay very well these days. After only a few months since Liferay Portal 6.1 was introduced, this company witnessed half a million downloads of their 6.1 software. So what does Liferay decide to do next? How does this sound? Take Liferay through a multi-city roadshow so even more business users and organizations become aware of what Liferay has to offer.

That's right, if you want to find out more about Liferay Portal you may have an opportunity to visit with the people of Liferay at a city near you. If the roadshow doesn't work for you, you may also want to check Liferay out in the upcoming 2012 CMS Expo in Chicago. During this May event, Liferay is a Featured CMS in one of the best yearly Learning and Business CMS conferences I've ever attended. I think this is a pivotal year for LIferay and you don't want to miss out getting to know this enterprise open source company.

To learn more about the Liferay's Portal 6.1 half a million download as well as the roadshow, I've attached their press release below.

I like the concept of Social Umami as it likely would be what you would get if you combined Pinterest, Amazon, and Facebook all into one site.  Social Umami is a product recommendation network for the social consumer (that's you and me). People can share their favorite products with friends, purchase their latest finds, get recommendations or discover and follow other Umami users and their tips.

I've been an occasional beta tester of this social network for several months. The site definitely has some rough edges to it which is likely why it is still in beta. However, if you have ever met Manish Dixit, a co-founder of Social Umami, you soon realize this site has the building blocks of something big. Social Umami is a evolving site with lots of ideas that just needs a little more time to come into fruition.

Social Umami is also a great example of what Liferay can do for social networking and shows that Liferay is much more than a portal. I've attached Liferay's recent press release announcing Social Umami officially to the press and public. This is a site that I encourage you to look at more than once whether you're a Liferay fan or a social networking fan.

New Social Network Features Rich Social Collaboration Capabilities within Liferay Platform

Social Umami leverages Liferay’s out-of-the-box tools to create viral shopping experience

LOS ANGELES — (February 14, 2012) — Liferay, Inc., provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, announced today the launch of a new social shopping network by Liferay partner Social Umami that was built on the Liferay platform. Social Umami, which allows users to share their favorite consumer products with friends, is now available in beta at www.socialumami.com.

I'm a huge fan of eGovernment and Government 2.0 initiatives. A few years ago we started seeing government sites adopting open data initiatives and adding features that allowed the public to provide more feedback to the government that served them. Changes such as these are good initiatives by governments as they continue their evolution into the digital age. Recently, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts redesigned their official website, Mass.gov, using the Percussion CM System.

Before I begin, let me confess that I don't know much about Percussion Software beyond what I read in their press releases. In fact, you'll find that some of the information here came straight out of one of their press releases and you'll want to continue your research beyond what I've written here. However, personal experience has shown me that any redesign work done with government websites is hard work with my hurdles to cross. So after I took a look at the Mass.gov site, it didn't take much arm twisting from Percussion's marketing people to go beyond my comfort level and talk about a product I really should know a whole lot more about.

A couple weeks ago, Liferay's marketing and communication folks sent me an email mentioning that Liferay was included as a "Leader" in Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. After my usual procrastination I finally got around to reading the report and what follows in this blog post are some impressions that jumped at me while reading the report. I'm not convinced the randomness of these personal thoughts make up a blog post (at least a well-written blog post) but I'm going for it since my public note taking often turns out better than a well polished article.

The report offers some fascinating insights regarding the state of portals. I want to respect Gartner's terms and copyrights so no graphics or direct link to the actual report will be available from this post. If you want to read the report, Liferay is providing access to the reprint of this report via a link provided on their Award and Recognition page (click on the "Read Magic Quadrant" link). The Magic Quadrant is Gartner's graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. The graphic depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace. In this case, Garner is measuring the portals strength in "completeness of vision" as well as "ability to execute".