The course starts out with an introduction to Liferay Portal: what it is, what it can do, and why you should use it. You will see some use cases for running Liferay Portal and understand how you might apply the power of the platform to your environment. We will then jump right in and begin configuring a Liferay bundle for the enterprise by connecting it to a MySQL database and configuring it so that it can send mail notifications to users.

Since it is likely that most system administrators already have an application server environment into which they want to integrate Liferay Portal, we will then go through the steps necessary to install Liferay manually on an existing application server. For this, we will use a GlassFish server, which operates similarly to several of the commercial application servers. This will give you a good idea of what it will be like to install Liferay Portal in your environment, using the procedure for your particular application server documented in the Liferay Portal Administrator's Guide.

We will then switch gears a little and learn how to administer a Liferay Portal server, using the Control Panel. You will learn how to set password policies for your users, configure the way users authenticate to Liferay, and more. After this, you will learn how to connect Liferay to an LDAP directory and configure multiple methods of single sign-on. You will see how to monitor Liferay, change log levels, view run-time system and portal properties, connect Liferay Portal to OpenOffice.org for document conversion, and more. After this, you will be introduced to Liferay Portal's properties file, and will learn how to modify settings in Liferay using this file so that you can customize the settings without a GUI. This allows you to commission multiple servers with the same settings very easily. Next, you will learn how to manage plugins. You will deploy some plugins from Liferay's plugin repository, and you will learn how to connect your Liferay instance to other plugin repositories. You will also learn how to deploy plugins that are not in any repositories, both from the GUI and from the command line.

We will continue our coverage of plugins with an exercise on creating your own plugin repository. This skill will enable you to manage plugins for which you have the responsibility of keeping up to date in your environment. You will find that Liferay makes it easy for you to manage your applications in this way.

The final topic for the day will be to show how you can configure access to Liferay Portal's web services infrastructure. This is a powerful feature that lets you use web services to remotely pull data from or push data into the portal. Because it is so powerful, it also needs to be secured properly, and you will learn how to do this.

Most of day two will be spent on clustering. You will install a virtual machine on your system which contains all the software you might typically use on an actual server. Using this, you will cluster two Liferay instances behind an Apache web server running as a reverse proxy. You will learn all the nuances of configuring a Liferay cluster, including a clustered cache, a clustered Jackrabbit repository, and more. And you will be free to take this virtual machine with you when you leave class, so that you can take what you have learned and directly apply it to your real environment.

After the clustering exercise, you will learn about the new Liferay workflow framework. You will start by installing the Kaleo Workflow Engine and also learn how to install additional workflow definitions. To complete the exercise, you will need to configure woflow on the Web Content publishing process and the document library. You'll create several test accounts and a test role to get first hand experience at managing the workflow process.

On the last day of the course, we will begin with tuning a Liferay server for performance. You will learn several specific ways to make Liferay Portal run faster, and will be introduced to some tools which will allow you to profile your system to see what is happening while your server is running.

The next topic is Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP). You will learn how to make your Liferay Portal both a Producer and a Consumer for WSRP. You will run a portlet from a remote server on a completely different platform on your local Liferay instance, and this will show you how you might use this feature in heterogeneous environments.

We will next cover some miscellaneous, but necessary topics for systems administrators. You will learn how to back up a Liferay Portal instance so that you don't lose any data in case of catastrophe. You will also see how Liferay integrates with Google Analytics so that you can monitor your site's traffic. Next will be presented how to turn up Liferay's logging to help you diagnose problems. And finally, you will learn how to upgrade Liferay from one version to the next, equipping you for your upgrade to the next release.

As you can see, the Liferay System Administrator course is a comprehensive presentation of all the topics you will need to effectively set up and maintain a running Liferay Portal installation.