Open Source Recommendation – Jahia

Centric is doing more and more business building enterprise class web portals for our clients. What’s a portal?  Briefly, portals are feature rich web sites that allow for collaboration, personalization, search, content management, business process automation, forms processing, and data display. We love these projects because there is almost always a very clear business mandate and associated ROI on the projects resulting in much client enthusiasm.

In the spirit of being helpful to my fellow IT professionals, I thought I’d pass along some information about an open source portal-building product we’ve recently used on a project for a regional insurance carrier with great success – Jahia (www.jahia.org).  Jahia’s web portal building product brings together Enterprise Web Content Management, Document Management, Collaborative Tools, a Portlet Server, and Personalization in one integrated package.  The product is quite popular in Europe, and is gaining in popularity in the US.
What makes Jahia special?  Certainly the fact that unique functionality is brought together nicely in a single package.  You can also manage your public and private domains on a single instance off the product.  The product is Java based and adheres to the JSR 168 Portal Server specification.  Finally, our developers were able to quickly come up to speed on the techniques needed to build sites using Jahia.

Oh, and don’t forget price.  Due to the open source model there is a free community edition of the product.  Standard, Professional, and Enterprise editions are very favorably priced when compared to other high-end offerings.

When you’re embarking on your next web build project, give Jahia a look.   I welcome your comments.
Mike Brannan