Enterprise Portal at Non-Enterprise Prices (free, that is)

Liferay Opensource Enterprise Portal version 1.8 released with some major changes

Liferay (http://www.liferay.com)was developed out of the lack of a lower end portal solution. The result is a pretty deep solution that handles not just the basic users and portlet drawing, but also has a full administrative interface, documented support for all of the major databases, documented support for the main J2EE application servers (JBoss/Jetty, JBoss/TomCat, Oracle AS, Pramati, WebLogic, Orion, and more coming soon, see www.Liferay.com for versions and latest details) and single sign-on capabilities and multiple language support.In addition to the included portlets, Apache Lucene is used to enable document searching.

Liferay is a true J2EE application, relying on numerous patterns, EJBs and built on top of the Struts platform. An XML-based registry is also used to store portlets. A number of portlets are included, including a guestbook, a calendar, a mapping utility using Expedia, news, eMail, weather, polls, a document library, live stock information and more . It's a great start for anyone launching a portal project.

Liferay is clearly a good option for anyone launching a Enterprise Portal with less budget. Because Liferay is a complete application, it will work well for many companies out of the box.

The latest version can be downloaded from http://www.liferay.com