Our customer wanted to offer additional services for his customers, such as new possibilities for communication, as well as telecommunication and creating communities according to users’ interests.

The major requirements, carried out successfully, were user friendliness, ability to change the portal layout and support of custom UI themes.

One of major tasks was to develop a solution based mainly on the existed open source components. The point was to reuse the existing solutions as much as possible for rapid application development and stability. The main decision was to develop the portal as a set of independent JSR-168 portlets and chose Liferay as a portlet engine. We also used some third party libraries, well-known and widely-used ones, which have large and active communities of users, to ensure they are safe and flexible.

The portal contains the following modules, which allow to create communities, communicate with other users, and establish new connections, etc.:

• a user module, with the help of which users register and subscribe to various services;
• and an administration module, which enables management of user accounts and groups.

The portal is integrated into an e-mail system, which allows users to browse their mail boxes and send / receive letters to / from other member of the network. 

Technologies and Tools Used: Spring Framework 2.0, Hibernate 3.x, Portlet API 1.0; Eclipse 3.x, IntelliJ IDEA 6.x (Java); J2SE 1.5, Tomcat 5.5, LifeRay 3.6/ 4.2.1; MySQL 5.0; OpenLDAP 2.3.27, Zimbra 4.5 (Mail Server); Verisign API, PayFlow Pro (PayPal), PayEx WebServices; MS Project, IBM Clear Case, IBM Rational Clear Quest.

Efforts: 22 man-months