First Steps into Liferay Portal 6EE (Enterprise Edition): Part 1

Recently I was tasked with setting up a test Liferay portal environment to see how it compares with our current Oracle WebCenter Interaction 10.3 platform.  While I'm withholding my opinion for now, I thought I would share some information to help others that are also seeking to setup a Liferay environment.  All of this info is available elsewhere obviously, but you'll have to browse through a series of documents and do a little hunting to dig it all up, so I thought I'd share the basics.

1. Download 
1. Get the software: http://www.liferay.com/get-ee-trial/downloads/portal
2. you'll need to create an account on liferay.com to get to the download page
3. you'll need a trial license to do anything with the downloaded software so contact their sales team for a 30 day license - you can extend your license by contacting the sales folks again later
4. For evaluation purposes they recommend getting the tomcat bundle
2. Hardware/Software Requirements
1. Liferay doesn't seem to offer official documentation on what is/isn't supported.  Naturally this was extremely disconcerting, but given that this is just a test environment I took them at their word that their software is OS and DB agnostic.
2. We chose to run on a single VM (Citrix XenServer) running Windows 2008 R2 SE 64bit, Xeon x5670 2.93GHz processor, 4gb RAM and MS SQL Server 2008 SE 64bit
1. I've heard you can run on a laptop with 2gb of RAM with no problem
3.  Install
1. Unzip the tomcat bundle
2. Copy the license file into the /deploy folder
3. Run startup.bat from /tomcat/bin
4. Voila! you are up and running

The Basics
Admin login: test@liferay.com/test

Navigation:
The "Go to" dropdown is essentially a list of all Communities a person is subscribed to. This is synonymous with "My Communities" from Oracle WebCenter Interaction.

Create a community

1. Under the “Manage” dropdown select control panel
2. Click on Portal: Communities
3. Click on Add
4. Click on Save
5. Note: Communities won’t appear under the “Go to” dropdown until they have pages assigned to them.

Create a page within a community

1. Under the “Manage” dropdown select control panel
2. Click on Portal: Communities
3. Click the Actions link to the right of the community you want to add pages , and select Manage Pages
4. Type the name of the page and select the type of page it will be then click  the Add Page button

To add a portlet to a page

1. Under the “Add" dropdown select "More..."
2. Drag the elements onto the page or click the "Add button" to the right of the element

Configure Active Directory Authentication & Profiling Source

1. Login as an Admin
2. Under the “Manage” dropdown select control panel
3. Click on Portal: Settings
4. Click on “Configuration: Authentication"
5. Configure AD

Helpful links:

1. Admin guide: http://docs.liferay.com/portal/6.0/official/liferay-administrator-guide-6.0.pdf
2. Forums: http://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/category/243728

(Click to enlarge)