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Liferay Social Office is a unique app that has been around for some timebut up until recently, it hasn't been compatible with the most recent release of Liferay, namely Liferay 6.2. Well, no longer will you have to wait. Social Office is now available and updated to work with the latest release of both the Community Edition and Enterprise Edition of Liferay.
This new release now takes advantage of all of the great new features provided by Liferay 6.2, including the upgrade to AlloyUI 2.0, the revamped Calendar and Document Library and a new, extensible Notifications portlet.
Here's some more info (and some sweet, sweet screenshots) about Social Office for those who are not familiar with it:
Liferay Social Office is a dynamic team workspace solution that provides holistic enhancement to the way you and your colleagues work together. By adapting today's most innovative social technologies to the unique needs of productivity and goal-driven enterprise teams, it enables an important shift in how and why communication happens. Key features include, but are not limited to:
<ul>
<li>Documents: shared document repository with Microsoft Office integration.</li>
<li>Communication: instant notifications, team calendars, webmail, task management and contact management.</li>
<li>Collaboration: integrated threaded discussions, blogs, and wikis with related assets and federated search.</li>
<li>People: searchable user profiles with user tagging, friending, integrated chat and simplified Social Office user management.</li>
</ul>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/contact_center_notification.png" alt="liferay social office" />
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/site_home_strata_scheme.png" alt="liferay social office" />
Check out more about <a href="http://www.liferay.com/web/vicki.tsang/blog/-/blogs/announcement-social-office-3-0-ce-ee-released-for-portal-6-2">Social Office</a> or learn more about <a href="/products/liferay/">Liferay</a>.

Social Office updated to work with Liferay 6.2

mike-johnston

<a href="http://liferay.com/" target="_blank">Liferay, Inc.</a>, has announced the release of its Audience Targeting app for Liferay Portal.
Liferay offers <a href="http://liferay.com">open source portals</a> fit for enterprising companies and orgnizations, including Fortune 500 companies such as Allianz, Siemens, Toyota and the United Nations.
Through Liferay's new Audicence Targeting app, companies can show the right content at the right time to their visitors to create the most relevant, engaging web experience for the people they want to reach.
<h2>The Big Three Audience Engagement Questions</h2>
Marketers across the world are constantly in search of ways to connect with their audiences and have online conversations through valuable, interesting content. Using Liferay's Audience Targeting app, businesses can make authentic connections with their customers, partners, employees and any other individuals visiting their sites.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/liferay_-_audience_targeting_config_admin700x0.png" />
The app, which is now <a href="https://www.liferay.com/marketplace/-/mp/application/43707691">available on the Liferay Marketplace</a>, offers the ability to tailor specific content for audiences based on user behavior on the site, user information such as age and gender, social media attributes, and more. Marketers can also create targeted campaigns, track user actions and generate reports on the effectiveness of the campaigns.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/liferay_-_audience_targeting_user_rules700x0.png" />
Edwin Chung, VP of Product Development for Liferay, made these comments:
<blockquote>“Getting audience engagement right comes down to solving three questions. Who are you trying to engage, what information is important to that person, and what is the best way to display the targeted content on your site? Whether it’s your customers, your partners, or your employees, personalized audience engagement is quickly becoming an expected part of their interactions with your company.
We recognize this and continue to evolve our solutions for audience engagement and content targeting to give our customers the tools they need to provide better, more customized user experiences across the board.”</blockquote>
According to Liferay, their position as a portal provider gives them a uniquely advantageous position to serve the entire customer lifecycle, from prospecting to deal closing to ongoing customer service interaction.
To learn more about how you can use Liferay Portal to engage audiences, visit <a href="http://www.liferay.com/engage">www.liferay.com/engage</a>. You can also find out more about Liferay's new Audience Targeting app via their recent blog post.
Additionally, be sure to check out <a href="/products/liferay/" target="_blank">Liferay through our CMS Directory</a>.

Liferay Unveils Audience Targeting App For Liferay Portal

Recently, we spoke with Bryan Cheung, CEO of Liferay about the future of the Liferay platform and his thoughts on the future. Liferay has been expanding rapidly and experiencing a large increase in interest thanks to a tough economy and a need for companies and organizations to find low cost, efficient solutions. Here is the interview in full, enjoy.
CC: Recently, you announced a <a href="/liferay-to-ship-mulesoft-tcat-server-bundle-new-offering-makes-web-deployment-faster-and-easier/" target="_blank">partnership with Mulesoft</a> to provide an alternative method of packaging Liferay, do you think this is going to change the dynamic of Liferay in the market?
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/bryanweb.jpg" alt="Bryan Cheung" />
BC: I think the larger story here Mike is our emphasis on Liferay as a platform. Really moving beyond just the software to Liferay and you know, some of the adjacent technologies all working together to provide solutions for businesses. So a big part of that story for example is our developer tools that we've been building over the last couple of years, some of the presentation layer frameworks that we've been building like Alloy but then on the deployment front, we want to make sure it's as easy as possible for people to get Liferay running in a number of different environments. We've already been doing that and I think it's been one of the more defining differentiators for Liferay since the inception of the product. So, the Mulesoft offering is really just an extension of that. Liferay's always been able to run in all of these different application servers and now we're targeting the Mulesoft offering as well.
CC: What prompted your decision to go with Mulesoft? Were there specific reasons for its selection?
BC: We had a number of customers in Europe who were interested in obtaining official professional support for Tomcat in addition to Liferay. It was something that we had offered unofficially as part of our support subscription but for those who wanted a little bit more assurance there, we thought that having this relationship would be helpful.
CC: Since the release of Liferay 6 back at the West Coast Symposium, it seems to have put more focus on Liferay as a multi purpose platform. I think prior to it, most people including myself thought of it specifically as a portal and now people are seeing it more as an all purpose tool for multiple deployments. Have you seen a growth in enterprise deployments since 6 came out in a significant number?
BC: We had momentum prior to the release of 6 itself and it's hard for me to separate out Liferay 6 itself versus the overall momentum of the company but we're definitely seeing a lot of growth and momentum overall. I would like to think that Liferay 6 has a good deal to do with it just because we introduced so many aspects of the product that enterprises need, workflow obviously being one of them, some of the auditing capabilities and then the overall ease of use.
CC: What changes have you seen from your customers since the release of 6? Have they had more unique requirements that they now feel they are more easily able to adapt to now with Liferay?
BC: We're seeing a lot of hype around the whole concept of social these days and I think people are adding the social moniker to whatever their existing application category is sort of making a big marketing push for it. It's interesting because portals have always really been about connecting the right people to the right information and the right applications, getting them in touch with other people and I think the social element is now broadening and deepening that where it's not just about personalization anymore but it's also community and context.
When you add that social dimension to all of these traditional solutions: intranets, portals, websites, online marketing presences, Liferay or a platform like Liferay, really makes it easy to bring all those things together and to put that social context around it.
CC: We've been hearing a lot more about Liferay than we did about a year ago or so, what do you think is contributing to this momentum and to your growth?
BC: I think it's a combination of the arrival of the product at a certain stage of convergence, bringing a lot of the features into a cohesive whole and then it's also the larger industry trends and economic trends that are going on. On the industry trends side, I think we are seeing a convergence and consolidation among a lot of these adjacent technologies so people aren't really thinking so much in terms of “I need a content management system” or “I need web publishing” or “I need collaboration” but more like “I need to put a lot of these things together and build this thing that I have a vision for and it involves people, it involves stuff, it involves getting people into groups and teams” and Liferay just does a lot of this well. On the financial side obviously with the prices we've been dealing with since 2008, that was really a driver for people to explore more cost efficient solutions like Liferay. More efficient not only from the perspective of the initial costs and the subscription costs but also, as companies are being shaken up, they need to move quickly, they need to bring great ideas to market more quickly. When you use a more flexible and all inclusive platform like Liferay, you are going to be able to response more quickly.
CC: Do you attribute that flexibility to the fact that Liferay is an open source platform or do you think thats more of a combination of that factor and the fact that your team has been able to develop with a decent turn around?
BC: Well, it's definitely both. Open source is a huge part of it and I think our team is also a huge part of it. On the open source side, when you have that kind of scrutiny across such a large number of customers and community members, you really are forced to build a leaner, better product. You can't have bloated code and you are constantly improving the code so thats definitely a factor. Another part is just not having the legacy that some of the other bigger software vendors might have of being older products and being less agile. Of course, huge kudos to my engineering team who are able to spot all of the upcoming trends and respond to them so quickly.
CC: Does Liferay have any plans to expand integration capabilities with any other platforms such as ERP solutions or any other vendors?
BC: Our general strategy is two fold. I think there are some major software packages that its in our interest to develop integrations for. For me personally, things like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange and Outlook would make a lot of sense to have some preconfigured integrations for. Not intending to replace those systems but really to work alongside them. I think one of the reasons that SharePoint was so popular is because of the way that it works nicely with office and outlook and so we want to look at some of that. There are a whole lot of Lotus Notes customers out there, maybe not as much as on the Microsoft side but it's still a good 30-40% of the market that have so much legacy information in their Notes installations that they are not going to be able to migrate out so having a good solution for bringing that content into a Liferay deployment and then putting social and other contexts around that content will give customers the best of both worlds where they've still got all of their content but we're modernizing it and adapting it for the 21st century.
The other major thing, and you will definitely hear about this in the coming months, is the Liferay marketplace. The marketplace is really going to enable people to have integrations with some of these systems that our partners are going to be able to build for us and deliver to a Liferay audience really quickly through and online presence on the website.
CC: Is Liferay capable of functioning within a cloud deployment?
BC: Yes, Liferay has been designed to deploy to any number of environments. You know, that covers a number of considerations. One is obviously if you've already got some infrastructure pieces then we don't want to force you to swap that out for other stuff. If you've already got IT folks that are well versed in those environments, then you don't want to swap out that expertise. This makes Liferay as widely addressable as possible as far as the different environments it can run on. We do have some customers that have deployed Liferay into cloud environments.
CC: What is the next major packaging project you are working on?
BC: Our next major project is Social Office. Our first real attempt at a solution within the Liferay platform and then we've got some other ideas as well as to some other packaged solutions we can build.
CC: Great, well thanks for taking the time to speak with us Bryan!
BC: Ok thanks a lot Mike.
Do you want to learn more about Liferay? You can read the rest of the <a href="/tag/liferay">Liferay news</a> or <a href="http://www.liferay.com" target="_blank">visit their website</a>.

Interview with Bryan Cheung, CEO of Liferay

<a href="http://www.liferay.com">Liferay</a> CEO, Bryan Cheung, today announced a new product from Liferay that is due out in Q4 of 2010. This new product is being called LESA.
LESA stands for Liferay Enterprise Support Application and is a tool that allows support engineers within companies to provide exceptional enterprise support for their clients.
Liferay plans to use this product in-house to allow their customers to rate and rank the responses from their support team.
LESA came about after Liferay had been using Atlassian's JIRA product as a support platform within their company for a number of years and now, with the release of Liferay 6EE, they realized they were able to completely rebuild this system with their own tools.
LESA also has effective built in metrics which allows for more real time analytics for managers and company professionals.
Looking at the product on the projector as Bryan is showing it off, it looks like an incredibly nice and clean interface that provides exactly what companies who use/need support software but don't want to be overwhelmed with too much data on the screen at one time.
Here are some screenshots of the new app:
<img title="landing-page" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/landing-page-580x375_owna6q.png" />
<img title="add-ticket-page-1" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/add-ticket-page-1-580x394_ycetr5.png" />
<img title="add-ticket-page-2" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/add-ticket-page-2-580x570_jjr9ou.png" />
<img title="ticket-info" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/ticket-info-580x595_bwqx8k.png" />

Liferay announces LESA - Liferay Enterprise Support Application

Today marks the first day of <a href="http://www.liferay.com/wcs">Liferay's West Coast Symposium</a> and CMS Critic was in attendance to cover this event.
There was definitely a large turnout with a crowd of approximately 250 or so in attendance. The attendees ranged from Liferay staff and community members to partners and customers and there was a lot of buzz in the air about the new release.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/eden11_yqorou.jpg" alt="The Crowd @ Liferay's WCS" />
At 9:00 am, Liferay's Chief Marketing Officer, Paul Hinz took to the stage to begin the introduction of Liferay 6EE.
<img title="Paul Hinz, CMO - Liferay" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/dsc_6190-580x385_rj0sve.jpg" alt="Paul Hinz, CMO - Liferay" />
Some of the highlights from his talk:
<ul>
<li>Back in 1995, we were building web applications, web content. Most of it was centered around Apache but they were very simple applications and content. Then came Tomcat was more focused on application development and building apps on the web. This in turn, led into the idea that we can't just build with random tools and have developers assemble things on their own, we actually need application stacks.  In 2000, some of the major companies began providing these stacks: application layer, portal layers, collaboration layer, etc. These layers became more and more complex. Then jBoss came around and this was important because there was now a lower cost and it was lighter weight and easier to use. So now there was this open source aspect that had a lower cost and felt simpler and people liked it.</li>
<li>We started to see more and more trending toward open source projects and applications. Then in 2005, this trend towards simplicity led to LAMP becoming very popular.  A lot of the external properties were being built using LAMP and the focus from developers started to gear towards these open source stacks. Then a few more trends happened and rich apps came into play such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and similar properties and the social aspect of the web and of our content started to become a focus.</li>
<li>Every five years, there is a major focus change and now in 2010 there is a change that is about to happen. A single enterprise has a large number of different applications that they have to build.  The current trend seems to be towards what he called, Strategic Open Source.</li>
<li>Strategic Open Source is where the CIO now focuses their attention not only on the mission critical layer of apps but actually starts looking at these lower level open source applications and wants to get them supported and integrated into the existing infrastructure.</li>
<li>There is now a need to have a development platform that allows you to build your presentation layer, that gives you the content management and workflow capabilities and also gives you that rich developer aspect.</li>
<li>Collaboration has changed how we are building applications. If you look at the enterprise, we started with email then calendars began being added. Over time, blogs, wikis and other platforms have been integrated. There is now a strong need to build social applications.</li>
<li>There are a large number of companies that have portal based platforms but the platforms themselves are not progressing forward. This leaves their customers facing an end of feature life. The product may not be end of life but there will be no enhancements and with the new requirements we just discussed, this leaves these customers in a bad position.</li>
<li>Liferay, however, continues to add features. They support 11 different operating systems, 12 different databases and 11 different containers.</li>
<li>The customers who are facing end of feature life on their existing solutions are now going to be looking for a way out. Paul mentioned that a conservative number is 10,000 different customers who are facing end of feature life.</li>
</ul>
One of the most interesting announcements was the new First year Free offer that Liferay is extending to these customers who are facing end of feature life and are stuck on an aging platform. What they are offering is these customers can get Liferay for free for one year to help them migrate their existing infrastructure from these stagnant solutions to Liferay without having to pay licensing fees for both their existing solution and for Liferay.
This is a very interesting and, in my opinion, brilliant strategy that Liferay has taken on. Existing customers who are in this position are going to be very hard pressed to find any other solution that is providing this kind of offer.
To hear more of Paul's talk, you can download the audio recording which we've made available at the bottom of this article.
After Paul came Liferay CEO, Bryan Cheung to discuss the improvements that the new release brings to the table.
<img title="Bryan Cheung, CEO - Liferay" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/dsc_6198-580x385_wnzafg.jpg" alt="Bryan Cheung, CEO - Liferay" />
Some of Bryan's key points included:
<ul>
<li>How do you get the benefits of tomcat without being at the mercy of open source volunteers and how do you get the benefit of enterprise software without the cumbersome overhead? He firmly believes that Liferay is about giving you all of the best options and allowing you to “be greedy”.</li>
<li>Liferay 6 as a solution is complete. It provides a portal, WCM, workflow, collaboration in a single package which eliminates the need to get other products.</li>
<li>What if you have existing products that you are tied to and are unwilling to migrate away from such as SAP or Salesforce? Liferay allows integration with these products as well. Not only that, but if for some reason you find Liferay is not the solution for your needs, migration away from the product is just as easy.</li>
<li>Liferay is 90% more affordable than comparable solutions.</li>
<li>There are 35,000 community members in addition to the existing employees which provides Liferay with a very large pool of developers that are continually enhancing and advancing their product.</li>
<li>Liferay is also only 215mb in size. This includes tomcat, a database, web content management, blog server, wiki, portal, identity management and role management. It is everything you need without the software bloat.</li>
</ul>
Want to learn more? We have made our entire recording available for your enjoyment here: <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/551052/SoundNote/453E111A-D1ED-477F-8CD7-6E02D12BB91C.soundnote/Liferay%20Introduction%20Speeches">Liferay Announcement</a>.
You can also visit Liferay on the web at <a href="http://www.liferay.com">http://www.liferay.com</a>

Liferay release ushers in major improvements

On November 7th 2013, Liferay held their first ever UK Portal Solutions Forum. The event promised an overview of the <a href="/liferay-portal-6.2-announced-at-liferay-s-north-america-event/#.UnwZhPkvlyU" target="_blank">newly released Liferay Portal 6.2</a> along with a full day of presentations, workshops, and much more.
<a href="http://www.liferay.com/" target="_blank"> Liferay</a> are a world-renowned provider of a leading enterprise-class portal solution, which is used as a digital platform by a number of Fortune 500 companies. With a respectable past, a bright future and a brand new version of their flagship product released just a few days ago, there was plenty for Liferay executives to talk about.
Naturally then, Liferay's Solutions Forum itself – held in the heart of London, was thoroughly enjoyable and full of content. So, let's delve into exactly how it went down.
<h2>Liferay Executives Kick Off the Event</h2>
After making my way down to the Solutions Forum on a chilly London morning, I was welcomed warmly by Liferay staff, and introduced to some of the event's organisers. I then swiftly made my way over to the breakfast area, where I filled up on Tea before the main event began.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/liferay_flag2.png" alt="Liferay Portal Solutions Forum" /> 
I was going to be live-tweeting the entire event via the <a href="https://twitter.com/cmscritic" target="_blank">CMS Critic Twitter account</a>, so I made myself comfortable in the main conference room – with my Tweeting finger poised.
Eddy Dueck – Liferay's marketing associate in charge of leading the event, started the proceedings, and was followed up by an impressive presentation given by company CEO, Bryan Cheung. He spoke extensively on the importance of understanding the evolution of customer relations, as well as how information should be presented to users and customers in general.
<blockquote>“The future of Portal Technology is to provide access to the right information, within the right context.” ~ Bryan Cheung <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LPSF2013UK&amp;src=hash"> #LPSF2013UK </a>
— CMS Critic (@cmscritic) <a href="https://twitter.com/cmscritic/statuses/398398080015687680"> November 7, 2013 </a></blockquote>
Bryan Cheung delved deep into the history of company-customer relationships, discussing how time has helped evolve and shape today's customer interaction. The example of a Suit Tailor was initially given, focusing on the personal relationship a Suit Tailor would have with his or her customer.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/bryan_cheung.png" alt="Liferay Portal Solutions Forum" />
As technology advanced, Bryan Cheung said, that personal, close relationship shared between a service provider and his or her customer was lost, simply due to companies focusing on a wider reach, rather than a personal one. However, the Internet, especially in its current form, helps combine both a personal touch and a wide reach.
<h2>Networking, Consulting &amp; Expert Exchanges</h2>
Along with the continued talks from various Liferay executives and other professionals, the Liferay Portal Solutions Forum also had something to offer outide of the conference room.
On top of the Breakfast before the main event, attendees enjoyed two networking Coffee breaks, where they could grab a hot drink, a slice of cake and converse with both their colleagues, and other professionals.
<blockquote>The networking Coffee break in full motion. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LPSF2013UK&amp;src=hash"> #LPSF2013UK </a> <a href="http://t.co/PNdqY3ZOox"> pic.twitter.com/PNdqY3ZOox </a>
— CMS Critic (@cmscritic) <a href="https://twitter.com/cmscritic/statuses/398410366256185344"> November 7, 2013 </a></blockquote>
Additionally, Liferay laid out a deliciously looking – and tasting lunch. Once again, the atmosphere was social, with attendees networking and exchanging details as they enjoyed their lunch.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/lunch.png" alt="Liferay Portal Solutions Forum" />
Following the lunch break, time was set aside for “Expert Exchange Discussions”. The idea was that each table had twenty minutes to discuss a pre-defined question, generally relating to internal company policy and approach to customer engagement.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/expert_exchange.png" alt="Liferay Portal Solutions Forum" />
Each discussion was moderated by a Liferay professional, and the event was topped off with session summary, which compiled the different opinions and ideas gathered at each table.
<h2>An Overview of Liferay 6.2</h2>
Towards the end of the Solutions Forum, Liferay made time to talk about their latest release, Liferay Portal 6.2.
Product Manager Juan Fernandez took to the stage, and began speaking about the new features boasted by their latest upgrade, made just days ago. He touched briefly on the new user interface, which he believed would help users get the most out of Liferay.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/liferay_6_2.png" alt="Liferay Portal Solutions Forum" />
He then moved on to the responsive nature of the templates supported by Liferay Portal 6.2, and how simple it now is for users to quickly and easily review and customize their responsive website via the Liferay mobile preview option.
<blockquote>“The new App Manager is now even easier to use when managing, activating and deactivating applications.” ~ Juan Fernandez <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LPSF2013UK&amp;src=hash">#LPSF2013UK</a>
— CMS Critic (@cmscritic) <a href="https://twitter.com/cmscritic/statuses/398492725659852800">November 7, 2013</a></blockquote>
After touching on the subject of Liferay's new App Manager, Juan Fernandez mentioned the enhanced multi-language options, and the ability for users to localise their URLS.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/liferay_6_22.png" alt="Liferay Portal Solutions Forum" />
Eventually, after some detailed presentations and interesting questions posed by the audience, Liferay's first ever UK Solutions Forum came to a close. A round of applause was given, and as the room emptied, you certainly got the feeling that every attendee was leaving satisfied with what they had seen, and heard.
For more information on Liferay's platform, <a href="http://www.liferay.com/" target="_blank">check out their website</a>. Additionally, you can explore more of <a href="/products/liferay/" target="_blank">Liferay via our CMS Directory</a>.
Also, if you'd like a better idea of how the events went down at the 2013 UK Liferay Portal Solutions Forum, <a href="https://twitter.com/cmscritic" target="_blank"> check out our Twitter feed</a>, where I live-tweeted all of the events directly from the Solutions Forum.

The Liferay Portal Solutions Forum UK, 2013 - #LPSF2013UK

This week, via the Liferay Symposium event being held in San Francisco, Liferay Portal 6.2 was officially announced.
Liferay, Inc, provider of the world's leading <a href="http://www.liferay.com">enterprise-class open source portal</a>, which is trusted by numerous Fortune 500 companies, have now enhanced their flagship product with a number of direct changes and additions, making it easier for enterprises to engage with their audience.
Attendees of the North America Liferay Symposium event are getting their hands on Liferay Portal 6.2 for the first time, with live demos on the floor and sessions tailored to highlighting key uses of new features. Let's explore exactly what those attendees will be experiencing.
<h2>More Modern, Intuitive &amp; Flexible</h2>
Liferay Portal 6.2, which is now available as part of the Liferay Enterprise Subscription, has introduced a higher emphasis on flexibility, by offering modernized support for both mobile and web apps.
All websites and content created with Liferay Portal 6.2 will now automatically display correctly on mobile devices in a responsive fashion. Administrators can make use of  mobile device previews right from the interface, enabling them to quickly see how pages look on smaller screens. Different rules can also be defined to handle specific devices and families in various ways.
To compliment these mobile enhancements, a new mobile Software Developer Kit (SDK), currently in the works for 6.2, will help developers build custom native apps that incorporate Liferay Portal functionality, including collaboration applications and integrated back end systems.
Accompanying these announcements, the Liferay CEO, <a href="http://www.liferay.com/about-us/leadership/bcheung" target="_blank">Bryan Cheung</a>, had this to say:
<blockquote>“Today’s enterprises need to interact with their customers, partners, and employees through compelling, seamless experiences across several channels. Liferay Portal 6.2 is a modern, intuitive platform designed to help enterprises understand and reach their customers across mobile, web, and live contexts.”</blockquote>
<h2>Better Mobile Engagement, Smoother Interfaces &amp; More</h2>
With increased mobile readiness with responsive layouts, one-click mobile previews, mobile device rules and a Mobile App SDK, Liferay have certainly added a new dimension to their Portal's mobile engagement. But there's more.
On top of these flexible mobile enhancements, Liferay Portal 6.2 users will also get to enjoy an entirely new, smoother interface with Twitter Bootstrap theming. Users also have access to the Bootstrap theme library, plus a new Control Panel theme with streamlined site administration features.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/liferay_-_liferay_portal_6_2_app_manager700x0.png" alt="Liferay Portal 6.2" /> 
Additionally, the update brings about an improved web management experience, thanks to Site Hierarchies for managing both content and users across multiple sites, along with Application Display Templates, which allow developers to quickly customize the look and feel of their applications.
Multi-Language support has also been enhanced for content, URLs and applications.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/lifeary_-_liferay_portal_6_2_control_panel700x0.png" alt="Liferay Portal 6.2" />
Finally, Liferay Portal 6.2 also brings increased platform stability through portlet sandboxing, and greater modularity in Liferay Portal architecture with ability to manage multiple versions of libraries. This improved modularity also makes it easier to share libraries across multiple plugins, upgrade and rollback portlets from version to version.
To find out more about what Liferay Portal can offer you, check our <a href="http://www.liferay.com/products/liferay-portal/overview" target="_blank"> Liferay's official breakdown of their popular product</a>. If you want more information on Liferay's current North America event, including agendas and speakers, you can find everything you need to know right here.
Additionally, you can learn more about <a href="/products/liferay/" target="_blank"> Liferay via our CMS Directory</a>.

Liferay Portal 6.2 Announced at Liferay's North America Event

With an estimated attendance of 300+ people, this year's West Coast Symposium has seen tremendous growth from the previous year.
Day One of their symposium started off with a great keynote from Chief Executive Officer, Bryan Cheung in which he highlighted some of Liferay's successes such as their recent presence in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals where they were positioned in the Leader's Quadrant.
Liferay 6.1 was also introduced to us for the first time. You can read our recent post on the 6.1 release here: <a href="/liferay-announces-6-1-release-at-west-coast-symposium/">Liferay announces 6.1 release at West Coast Symposium</a>.
There were also a number of excellent talks from various speakers on topics such as:
<ul>
<li>AlloyUI and Liferay Themes: Q&amp;A with the Directory of UI Engineering with Nate Cavanaugh</li>
<li>Web Services Supercharged: Consuming Web Services the Right Way with Brett Swaim</li>
<li>Games, Intranets and Harnessing Employee Creativity with Josh Asbury</li>
<li>Using Liferay as a Platform for Social Applications with Rich Sezov and Manish Dixit</li>
<li>Building a Social Platform: OpenSocial and Liferay with Dennis Ju</li>
</ul>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/liferay-audience.jpg" alt="Liferay WCS 2011 - The Audience" />
Check out the rest of our pictures from the event on Flickr here: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmscritic/sets/72157627607337725/">Liferay WCS 2011 Pictures from CMS Critic</a>
Following a full day of talks, <a href="http://www.cignex.com/">CIGNEX Datamatics</a>, a Liferay Partner, put on an amazing after party with a beer tasting from the <a href="http://widmerbrothers.com/">Widmer Brothers Brewery</a> in Portland, Oregon.
I've got to hand it to the guys at Cignex, they put on one heck of a party and it was an absolute blast. Perhaps it's because I'm Canadian but I can't think of any other type of party that could possibly top a beer tasting one. Oh and thank you for the Pretzel necklaces as well guys, good idea!
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-28_qgbfxn.png" alt="Liferay West Coast Symposium - After Party" />
Check out the rest of our pictures of the After Party on Flickr here: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmscritic/sets/72157627607454939/">Liferay WCS 2011 After Party Pictures from CMS Critic</a>
On the East Coast? You're in luck! There's an East Coast Symposium coming up. Stay tuned to <a href="http://www.liferay.com">Liferay's website</a> for details on the time and place.

Liferay's West Coast Symposium - Day One - #LRWCS2011

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We recently had an opportunity to have a chat with Brian Kim, COO and Cofounder of <a href="/products/liferay/">Liferay</a>, providers of one of the most popular open-source Enterprise Content Management Systems / Portals on the market. Here is the interview.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
I’m the Chief Operating Officer and one of the cofounders of Liferay. I was born and raised in Chicago. Growing up, I always had expressed interest in computers, but unfortunately never had the opportunity to get more exposure to it. In fact, I didn’t get my first PC until senior year of high school. It wasn’t really until I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago that I took the leap into programming. At Liferay, most of my time is now centered around the business and streamlining our internal operations, but I definitely still miss being a developer.
What is your opinion on the state of the CMS industry? How do you feel it has evolved over the past few years?
<img style="max-width:100px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/image_gallery100x0.png" alt="Brian Kim" />
The CMS industry is continuing to evolve in unique and exciting ways. I am particularly intrigued by the number of applications that are beginning to evolve toward focusing on mobile content ahead of traditional web content. As content is reused for multiple purposes and for multiple platforms, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that the right content is delivered to the right person at the right time. CMS platforms need to be intelligent enough to dynamically display content based on factors such as a user's location, device and previous interactions with the system, while also taking into account the special behaviors of mobile users (i.e., the fact that users on their mobile devices have shorter attention spans).
What do you think is lacking in the industry at the moment? What needs to change?
The health of the CMS industry provides a multitude of choices for content managers, and with so many different CMS solutions available, application integration needs to be on the forefront of every vendor's mind. Enterprise customers may have ten different CMS's serving different user bases with different needs, but if these systems don't integrate well, then it becomes increasingly difficult for this content to be used and repurposed by different systems. CMIS-compliance is a step forward and provides many opportunities for cross-platform integration, but developers and vendors need to get out of the mindset that their solution is the single “best” solution for a customer — odds are, it is a piece of a very large puzzle, and they need to make integration a priority.
You are involved in the CMIS initiative. What led to that involvement and what do you hope to see come from it?
Perhaps the most attractive aspect of CMIS was its ability to interoperate regardless of the underlying technologies, unlike JCR which only works with Java-based repositories. To put it another way, it was like WSRP for the Java portlet spec. We hope that CMIS can be useful for enterprises looking to unify their various repositories under one, unified interface — the portal.
Can you explain the concept behind CMIS and when you see it being used?
CMIS is a protocol that enables interoperability with content and document repositories. Liferay, having a built-in document repository, can act as a client to mount one or many CMIS-compliant repositories similar to how one would mount a network drive on an operating system. Through the portal, the user is thereby provided with a unified view of all the third-party repositories he or she may have the credentials to access.
Liferay has long been a very versatile company that has been able to stay on top of changing trends easily, why do you think this is? How have you managed to maintain this ability throughout the company’s growth?
In contrast to other commercial open source companies out there, Liferay was born as an open-source project first. It wasn’t until years later that the company was created. What that means is that we have always taken our community very seriously, and as a result, they play a vital part in the growth and direction of our product. Furthermore, as a private company not having received funding, we have always had the liberty to focus on building great software, without having to worry about meeting quarterly targets. And of course, we have such avid lovers of technology all throughout our company who are always looking to find ways to incorporate them into our product.
For those who are confused about the concept of portals, can you explain in laymen’s terms what a portal is and how they fit in the market?
Portal software makes it easier to build a single website out of multiple sites or web-based services. Because portals bring together content and offer a single cohesive experience across departments or organizations within an enterprise, they “sit above” other products in the market, such as dedicated content management systems, records management, customer relationship management, HR, and other enterprise systems.
But more than just surfacing the same information from other applications into a central location, we are looking to help connect those different sources or different applications in such a way that would create more business value than using them independently. For instance, assume you had a CRM and a marketing automation tool that integrated into your portal. Being able to view data from each centrally within the portal is great, but what if the portal allowed you to make connections between the two that provided unique analytics otherwise unavailable by each independently? Then imagine that the business user could make those connections using a GUI tool without having to request someone to code that for them. This is where we envision the portal bringing even more value to an organization.
Technically, Liferay is a very adaptable solution that can be deployed into a large variety of environments. What is the ideal use case for Liferay and when do you think it should be the first tool to consider using?
We’re seeing Liferay become more and more strategic within organizations looking to standardize their development processes. For example, companies, sometimes as a the result of acquisitions, may have inherited many different technologies making reuse and integration difficult. The benefit is that by using Liferay as a base platform for development, applications built on Liferay, using standard SDKs and following specifications, can then be reused and even repurposed for other business units within the same organization. Likewise, information that may be spread across many different groups and applications can also be shared, tagged and categorized centrally within Liferay.
What type of creative and unique technical uses of Liferay have you seen? What are some of your favorites?
The Liferay community is doing so many amazing and innovative things that this could be a very long list, but I will keep it short. There has been a very large push by our customers to deliver specific content to specific roles based on different behaviors the user has exhibited on their system. By using Liferay's auditing tools, rules engine and CMS and integrating it with their own systems, they are able to deliver relevant content from across the enterprise to their users. Additionally, they are utilizing our device recognition capabilities to ensure this content delivery happens regardless of the medium they are using.
Another very interesting use case of Liferay is by a book publisher that is creating a cross-platform publishing application. Content is entered using any one of their disparate systems. Liferay’s workflow engine will then put it through the appropriate approval processes for publishing to the web, but may include pushing specially marked content to other publication channels (books, magazines, etc.).
What can we expect to see from Liferay in the next release? Any new and exciting upcoming features or changes?
First of all, we’re making big changes to its look and feel by making sure that it works with Twitter Bootstrap. Not only will users be able to choose from a huge library of Bootstrap themes, but it will make the creation of custom themes even easier. Another cool feature is the ability to preview how your site would look on a different device (i.e. mobile, tablet, etc.) but all in your browser – no more having to find a specific device to test on. And finally, we took the time to enhance the functionality of all our applications, but especially our CMS, making management of content and sites all that much easier and streamlined for the regular user. There’s plenty more to talk about, but I’ll save some for the actual release.
How mobile-capable is Liferay? What types of changes are coming down the pipeline to make it more mobile-friendly?
Liferay has been designed to support unified web and mobile applications for quite a while, and there are new features coming in Liferay Portal 6.2. Out of the box, developers have multiple options for how they wish to build their mobile sites. Developers can leverage responsive design and build their sites to look great no matter how large or small the user's device is. But in some scenarios, developers need much more flexibility and would like to have a much more customized experience for different types of devices. For instance, they may wish to have all tablets and smartphones go to a dedicated mobile site, or they may just wish to apply a different theme for different devices. That's where our feature of Mobile Device Rules comes in. Using Mobile Device Rules, site administrators can configure different actions (changing the theme, redirecting to another site, changing the layout, etc), depending on different device types.
In the future, we're building out tools to help developers and site administrators easily leverage Liferay to seamlessly connect users to their data, regardless of device. We're also more tightly integrating the administration apps into using responsive design so they can be used from as many devices as possible.
Do you have any parting remarks you'd like to share?
With over 700,000 deployments worldwide, Liferay has helped to satisfy the business needs of our customers while growing a vibrant Liferay ecosystem. Our company has always strived to innovate and develop the best open-source software with the participation from contributors worldwide. In recent years, we’re happy to say Liferay community members have had even more opportunities to contribute to the future of the project through our ideation engine, forum posts, blog articles, user groups, marketplace applications and special project teams. I hope I’ve given you a little more insight into our company as we aim to make a positive impact in the world through great software. Thanks for your interest in Liferay.
—
Want to learn more about Liferay? Check them out in the CMS directory – <a href="/products/liferay/">Liferay</a>

Interview with Brian Kim, Liferay’s Chief Operating Officer

Liferay Inc., provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, announced today that Scott Tachiki, a seasoned financial executive, has joined the company’s leadership team as Chief Financial Officer.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/eric_mason_color-1_qbkdmr.jpg" />Tachiki brings about 20 years of business experience in management, corporate law and accounting. Before joining Liferay, he served as Chief Operating Officer and acting Chief Financial Officer at 4D Global Partners, a consumer electronics sales and marketing company based in Northern California.
“Scott’s impressive background in both law and finance makes him a great fit for his new role at Liferay,” said Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung. “We welcome him to our team and look forward to his contributions in the financial and contractual management of Liferay’s rapid global growth through its subsidiaries, partner networks and OEM business.”
Tachiki’s hire follows Liferay’s strong financial performance in the first half of 2011. The portal provider reported a 50 percent growth in revenue over the same period last year in its core business. Liferay has enjoyed such double-digit revenue growth for several years along with annual increases in profits since its founding.
<blockquote>“I’m excited to join an executive team at Liferay that has been so smart and financially savvy with its operations,” said Tachiki. “I am impressed by the team’s dedication to solid strategic growth, its devotion to Liferay’s employees and customers and its commitment to positively impacting the world as a core priority of the company.”</blockquote>
Tachiki specialized in mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance as an attorney at the law firms Simpson Thacher &amp; Bartlett and Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk &amp; Rabkin. A Certified Public Accountant, Tachiki previously worked at Deloitte &amp; Touche specializing in the financial services industry.
As Vice President of Business Development at LearningGate.com, a web-based grade book for teachers, he managed operations and successfully structured, negotiated and closed the sale of the company. Tachiki received his law degree from the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley and his bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.
For more information on Liferay’s new CFO, please visit <a href="http://www.liferay.com/about-us/leadership/stachiki">www.liferay.com/about-us/leadership/stachiki</a>.

Liferay Welcomes New Chief Financial Officer

<a href="http://liferay.com/" target="_blank">Liferay, Inc.</a>, has rolled out its latest project – Liferay Screens – in order to aid companies develop native apps for iOS and Android platforms.
Liferay is a vendor for <a href="http://liferay.com/">open source portals</a> designed for enterprising companies and organizations. Their clients include Fortune 500 companies such as Allianz, Siemens, Toyota and the United Nations to name but a few.
According to Liferay, Liferay Screens is a, “collection of fully native mobile components, using all the power of your Liferay Portal as an enterprise grade mobile back-end.”
<h2>Responding to the Mobile Explosion</h2>
In case you haven't heard, mobile is pretty darn big nowadays.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/liferay.png" />
This release is part of Liferay’s larger push to provide a mobile platform for companies developing several native apps across business units. Through Liferay Screens, the company hopes to save its customers time and money by making it easier for mobile apps to reuse core data and services.
Here are some of the benefits that Liferay Screens brings to the table.
<ul>
<li>Liferay Screens comes fully compatible with standard development tools for iOS and Android</li>
<li>Lowers learning curve for developing apps backed by reusable back end services</li>
<li>Helps developers comply with UX and Brand requirements using Screens Themes, which follow Apple and Google’s design languages and allow for custom colors</li>
<li>Adaptive layouts automatically ensure apps function and appear correctly on phones and tablets of any form factor</li>
<li>Reusable services like registration, user management, localization, and authentication help developers focus on more important business logic</li>
</ul>
Juan Fernandez, Liferay's Product Manager, had this to say upon the release of Liferay Screens:
<blockquote>“The problem we’re trying to solve for companies is, ‘how do we quickly build great mobile apps that integrate with the overall customer experience, while keeping development costs to a minimum?
Companies have to respond to the mobile explosion, but they need to do so with a strategy. With Liferay Screens, you can develop high-quality, elegant mobile apps quickly without compromising on these long-term considerations.”</blockquote>
Find out more about Liferay Screens.
Also, be sure to check out <a href="/products/liferay/" target="_blank">Liferay through our CMS Directory</a>.

Liferay Speeds Up Mobile App Development With Liferay Screens Release

This year’s winner of the People’s Choice Award for Best Enterprise CMS is <a href="http://www.liferay.com">Liferay</a>!
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/liferay-250x156.jpg" />
Congratulations to everyone at Liferay for their awesome work and on this win. It certainly is an excellent option for enterprise users.
Liferay is an open-source enterprise portal solution. Some of the key advantages that the system offers is its ability to be deeply integrated with various web technologies (.NET, PHP, Java &amp; More). Liferay Portal  includes document management enhancements and the company has introduced the Liferay Marketplace, a new app store for its growing community of customers, developers and partners.
Liferay also offers Liferay Social Office, a social collaboration suite for enterprises. Their customers often select it for its lean qualities, although the company is building out a more comprehensive UXP with content management capabilities and its Liferay Social Office product. Liferay is very easy to adapt and customize to suit a variety of needs.
This isn’t the end of the awards, however, as the Critic’s Choice portion of the awards which will be selected by CMS Critic will be announced soon.
<ol>
<li>Liferay</li>
<li>Adobe CQ</li>
<li>Sitecore</li>
<li>Drupal</li>
<li>Typo3</li>
</ol>
Thanks to all for really driving hard for the votes and don’t forget to stay tuned to our site to find out which of our five shortlisted competitors below takes the <a href="/cms-critic-awards/">Critic’s Choice Award</a>, to be announced soon.

People’s Choice Winner for Best Enterprise CMS is…

Today, the world renowned <a href="http://www.liferay.com/" target="_blank">open source portal software</a> giants Liferay, Inc., is releasing a mobile software development kit.
Liferay, is a leading provider of enterprise open source portal and collaboration software products, servicing Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Their clients include Allianz, Carrefour, Danone, Rolex, Siemens, Toyota and the United Nations.
Their brand new Mobile SDK is part of their commitment to being a mobile-ready platform, which began with making responsive design work out of the box in Liferay Portal 6.2.
So, let's take a look at what Liferay customers can look forward to.
<h2>Bringing You into the Mobile Revolution</h2>
Liferay's new Mobile SDK takes the platform’s mobile capabilities a step further, making the unique benefits of Liferay Portal available to mobile app developers. According to <a href="http://www.liferay.com/about-us/leadership/bcheung" target="_blank"> Bryan Cheung</a>, Liferay's CEO, it's all about bringing customers into the mobile revolution:
<blockquote>“I’m excited that we’re thinking about how to bring our customers into the mobile revolution—and it really is a revolution, impacting every aspect of the way we do business and behave as a society. I think developers are going to love the Mobile SDK, because people are so hungry for the kind of immediacy that you only get from your smartphone. Anything that helps you make mobile apps more quickly with more relevant functionality is going to add a lot of value.”</blockquote>
The Liferay Mobile SDK has been designed to work seamlessly with <a href="http://www.liferay.com/products/liferay-portal/liferay-portal-6.2" target="_blank">Liferay Portal 6.2</a> along with other major mobile app platforms including iOS and Android.
Among Liferay Mobile SDK's many features include:
<ul>
<li>Authentication against your Liferay Portal instance</li>
<li>Exception handling</li>
<li>Remote services calls</li>
<li>JSON parsing</li>
<li>Batch calls</li>
<li>Async calls</li>
<li>Auto-generated SDK, which is template based</li>
<li>Integration with Developer Studio</li>
<li>Compatibility with custom portlets</li>
</ul>
There are three key reasons to use the SDK when building mobile apps. These are:
<ul>
<li>Common shared services such as log-in, handling errors, and getting content to and from the mobile app (using JSON)</li>
<li>Use of Liferay’s built-in content and collaboration features in the mobile app</li>
<li>Use of custom objects or integrations in the mobile app</li>
</ul>
For example, a company whose CRM is already integrated with Liferay will find it much easier with the Mobile SDK to create a mobile app that browses customer records, with each sales rep will have personalized access to their customers.
Mobile apps designed by retail companies for their customers for instance, could take advantage of shopping catalog integration to quickly develop a native mobile e-commerce app. The experience could also be further enhanced with the phone’s camera and location services.
For the long-term, Liferay is hoping that its portal can be used as a central hub that aggregates data and interactions from mobile devices to help companies understand the needs and preferences of their customers and employees. Although in facing privacy issues, Liferay will naturally need to consider how companies can give more control of personal information to the users of the mobile apps they create.
In light of their new Mobile SDK release, Liferay's CTO, Michael Young,had this to say:
<blockquote>“We’re making mobile a priority. Our customers want this for a lot of the same reasons they chose Liferay: they don’t want to keep re-writing the same code for several mobile apps, and they want to consolidate integration points behind a single system. The solutions we’ve come up with for making websites and portals easier to develop cross over well to mobile app development.”</blockquote>
The Liferay Mobile SDK is available as an Eclipse plugin that can be installed into Liferay Developer Studio, Liferay IDE, or a developer’s own Eclipse environment. The Mobile SDK is also now <a href="https://github.com/liferay/liferay-mobile-sdk/releases" target="_blank">available for download</a>.
To get your hands on a free demo of the Mobile SDK, signing up for the <a href="http://discover.liferay.com/liferay-live-11apr2014" target="_blank">official webinar</a>.
For more information about Liferay and their Mobile SDK, visit their <a href="http://www.liferay.com/community/liferay-projects/liferay-mobile-sdk/overview" target="_blank">website</a>.
Additionally, be sure to explore more of <a href="/products/liferay/" target="_blank"> Liferay via our CMS Directory</a>.

Liferay Releases SDK to Streamline Custom Mobile App Development

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