# Overview of the Endeca Discovery Framework

The Discovery Framework enables rapid configuration of dashboard applications that offer the highly interactive Guided Navigation® user experience across a full range of structured and unstructured enterprise data.

The Discovery Framework is easy to deploy and ideal for the agile development of enterprise-quality applications. Due to component-based nature of the Discovery Framework, these applications are simple to control, adapt, and extend. It provides granular layout and configuration control to enable users to manage and personalize their own experiences. The Discovery Framework consists of an enterprise-class portal framework and a library of UI components that embody best practices in Endeca applications.

## About the Component SDK

The Component SDK is a packaged development environment for portlets, themes, layout templates, and other portal element. Endeca has modified Liferay's version of its Plugins SDK to include the Endeca enhancements, such as the EndecaPortlet core class. The installation and use of the Component SDK is covered in the Discovery Framework Extension Guide.