Liferay - Choosing Organization vs Portal Instance

Question

We are trying to create a SaS based portal using Liferay 6 for multiple (non related) organizations. And we want to go for a approach where we can generate these organization setup automatically based on user information.

We may require to have separate domains/websites for each organization.

As of now I have thought about two options for this

1. Portal Instance
2. Organizations

As per my understanding, i think this can be achieved by both of the above approaches. I would like to know your experience on both of these approaches on following points.

• Which one would be easy to administer in long run
• Which one can be easily programmed to create new setup automatically.
• What about data security related to keeping in one portal instance vs multiple instance (is there any such thing?? not sure)
• Any other approach to this?

Answer 1

Simple answer would be Portal Instances, since it was built for multi-tenancy.

Benefits to this approach would be that there would be segregation of data. Each instance maintains its own collection of users, communities, blog entries, etc.

Administration wise, there will be 1 account, the omni-admin, that can access all of these instances. On top that, each instance could have its own administrator that admins that particular instance.

Also, I don't believe using organizations will allow you to have separate domains for them.

Also going forward in Liferay 6.1, Organizations don't have pages only Sites have them, though we can mimic the behaviour with Sites.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I'm using Organizations for multiple sites, none of them sees each other, each one have their own users, roles, sections and communities. Apache and Liferay virtual hosts url's makes the proper redirects to each organization home page.

For the admin I think is easier because in one control panel you can manage everything, or just the "scope" you want.