How is Social Office Different from Liferay Portal?

Social Office benefits from its core, which is based on Liferay Portal. Users of both will find a comfortable, familiar interface, because many of the applications in Social Office come from Liferay Portal. However, while the core software is similar, the two are tooled for different purposes.

Illustration 1: The difference between Liferay Portal and Social OfficeLiferay Portal is a full featured web portal, containing an industry-leading suite of built-in applications and tools. It's highly customizable and businesses use it to run major web sites all over the world. We've optimized Liferay Portal for creating state-of-the art, robust web sites that serve millions of users every day.

Social Office has a more focused purpose. We've designed it for work groups needing to collaborate on documents and data in the office. The included tools and defaults were carefully chosen to provide users working within a group the ability to easily communicate, collaborate, and coordinate their tasks. Additional applications were added to the product to support these goals.

If you're creating a public web site and need the full features of an unparalleled, industry-leading engine to power that site, Liferay Portal is the ideal solution for you. If, however, you're creating a site that's designed to help people within specific groups communicate and accomplish tasks on a corporate Intranet, Social Office will help you accomplish that with minimal set up and administration.