Building an organizational structure in Liferay resembles the process of managing folders on a computer drive. An organization may have its suborganizations and—except the first level organization—at the same time, it can be a suborganization of another one. This folder-similar mechanism allows you to create a tree structure of organizations.

Let's imagine that we are obliged to create an intranet for a software development company. The company's headquarter is located in London. There are also two other offices in Liverpool and Glasgow. The company is divided into finance, marketing, sales, IT, human resources, and legal departments. Employees from Glasgow and Liverpool belong to the IT department.