Colayer was there long before Google Wave. Hence it is neither an extension, nor based on the same platform, but the concepts are very similar.
Colayer did not have a public version, but was for enterprises only and therefore little known to the publi…

It might be worthwhile mentioning that some OS portal / CMS solution providers try to address this problem for quite some time. Maybe an opportunity to have a closer look at LifeRay OS collaboration software, the recently announced Social Office solution, which covers lots of these areas as described above. Main targets are, as mentioned in the previous article, bringing down the number of different tools, structuring, organizing data, keeping track of versioning and more content management aspects. Keeping the communication wire clean. Losts these aspects are getting covered by LifeRay collaboration software. And not totally unimportant, it is for free, it is backed up by professional support, has an impressive user and development community, and is from stretch build on top of open standards. For integrators a relieve, no exotic non standard technologies that might lock you in on one provider.

Another problem area is how to integrate more than all these chats, documents, message boards, blogs and wikis into this information wave. How can we integrate core business data from our core systems into this mix of information. And specifically here is where the power of the on open standards based LifeRay solution has a strong point, the seamless integration of ESB and BPM solutions like jboss JBM and Apache service mix. This will open the door for integrating other processes and data into this information mix, based on standards like webservices, WSRP, SOAP, BPEL and so on.

Another nice aspect is that end users are not forced to change the way they handle their office suite. “LifeRay Social Office makes use of publicly available SharePoint® protocols to allow users to open, save, version, lock, and share documents directly between LifeRay Social Office and Microsoft Office®. This opens up new ways of integrating desktop workflow with web-based collaboration and document storage.”

Allows you to work on a task based criteria, collecting all relevant context and history on artefacts belonging to that specific task. Important is that this task can be teamed up with users participating in this flow of work. Problem is however, who are you collaborating with, how can you organize this collaboration within the guidelines of engagement on who you are allowed to exchange certain data with, what are the security issues here. LifeRay portal helps solving these organizational structure issues and enables setting up well designed workflows on top of complex organization structures, so you get the
actual collaboration structure and content context in a secured and manageable fashion.

Apart of this all, accept the fact that lifeRay is build on top of standards and widely used technologies, LifeRay supports all major application servers, databases and operating systems, minimizing the danger to get locked in by what kind of extend and making your final solutions flexible and scalable in a production like environment.

Getting curious?, just check out the feature list on this most elegant framework. http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/products/social_office

Btw, maybe it would nice to open a dedicated blog post on portal technology.

Rob