CollabNet Builds New Discussion Forums Using Liferay Developer and Collaboration Tools

October 30, 2007; 05:36 AM

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Liferay, provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, announced that CollabNet, the leading provider of Subversion® and other globally distributed software development tools has leveraged Liferay technology for its new Discussion Services functionality that is part of the recently released CollabNet Enterprise Edition 5.0.

Based on Liferay’s Message Board portlet and extended with Liferay’s ServiceBuilder tool, CollabNet’s Discussion Services is an enhanced collaboration tool for CollabNet’s collaborative platform for distributed development. “We saw the value and the potential of using Liferay’s development platform,” said Richard Murray, vice president of engineering at CollabNet. “There was a wealth of pre-built functionality available that provided a foundation to rapidly address the full range of our customers’ needs.”

Notably, CollabNet’s enhancements to functionality were made using ServiceBuilder, Liferay’s exclusive code generator tool. Prebundled as part of the portal platform, ServiceBuilder helps developers get code enabled for Web Services, Spring, AJAX, and EJBs so they can focus on writing the business logic.

“We are thrilled to see organizations leveraging the power of Liferay’s developer tools,” said Brian Chan, Chief Software Architect of Liferay. “They were created and pre-packaged with the basic portlets specifically so that enterprises can tap into the potential of our out-of-the-box offering.”

The Discussion Services combine mailing list and discussion forum features from CollabNet’s current CollabNet Enterprise Edition® product under their fine-grained project security system. This gives Discussion Services administrators full control over who can access what content using either interface approach. The basic Liferay Message Board portlet includes features that are most comparable with CollabNet’s current discussion forums tool such as discussions, threads, messages, attachments, RSS and email subscriptions. It operates under Liferay’s similar fine-grained permissions system that resulted from technology sharing with CollabNet early in the project’s development.

The Discussion Services extend the Message Board primarily in the areas of email access (posting, subscription, moderation and bounce handling), multiple discussion types (unmoderated, trusted and moderated), multiple subscription types (individual, digest and web) and administrative options designed to limit access and content.

“With Discussion Services it is now possible to move an existing mailing list archive under our project security umbrella and tighten its access controls,” shared Jeff Eastman, principal architect of the Discussion Services project. “Similarly, it is possible to take an existing discussion forum and open it up for less-secure email access as well. Technology sharing with Liferay has enabled us to produce a superior collaboration product”.

About Liferay:

Liferay Portal is the world’s leading enterprise open source portal framework with Fortune 500 clients world-wide. Liferay Professional Services offers technical support, custom development and professional training to ensure successful deployment of its flagship product in the most demanding IT environments. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles. For more information, please visit www.liferay.com.

About CollabNet:

With 1.2 million users, CollabNet is the industry's most widely used collaborative platform for software development. The CollabNet platform supports globally distributed teams in a centralized, cost-effective way, yielding 20% to 30% annual savings through reduced development infrastructure costs, increased productivity, improved project visibility and shared access to software assets. Founded upon open source principles, CollabNet is the primary sponsor of the Subversion® project, the new standard for distributed development teams.