Liferay Digital Experience Platform Reviews

• Flexibility to fit our business requirements under many different scenarios, from simple public web sites to customer or distributor portal solutions and intranets.
• As a J2EE and open source platform, this product allow us to extend its out-of-the-box features such as CMS, sites management, permissions, workflows, security system, mobile framework, etc. We can do this in a well-defined way by using custom plugins developed in Java with standard tools and J2EE specifications.
• Full support for enterprise systems integrations. Liferay allows us to integrate with our company systems, for instance, IAM, EIP, Web Services. It creates custom plugins or uses the OOTB integrations, like Siteminder, LDAP, CAS, SAML, and Amazon S3.
• Flexibility about the ecosystem, as you can choose between many configurations and products for Liferay installation. For example, Database (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL Server), App Servers (Tomcat, JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic), according to its certificated and supported compatibility matrix.

A good example in my organization (insurance sector) is that we can implement public, customer, and distributor portals for many countries with different requirements, in many different languages (including Greek or Arabic, flipping the full page reading).

Business people can manage the web content/pages and targeted campaigns including SEO for different user segments. This is possible by implementing custom components to guide the final clients through the purchase funnel to buy insurance policies. It can also provide customer tools, such as accident party reporting, and capture new leads to send them to the CRM system.

In our company, each country can have different backend solutions for CRM, IAM, quotation engines, etc. All these combinations are well supported by Liferay as a front-end solution including responsive design, tracking actions, analytics, etc.

Another good point was the acceleration around the built solutions. We created a reusable internal marketplace to share "Functional Assets" defined by the business, with many countries, adapting a few things like translations.

With this approach, any country is able to launch new features on their web sites with less cost, by just reusing the functional assets from other countries where they want to generate new opportunities.

I use the solution in my company for various purposes in areas like public websites, customer portals, self-service portals, employee intranet portals, corporate portals, and partner portals. The tool has multiple use cases. The tool also has digital e-commerce.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from security, easy functioning, and well-connected features. User management roles and permissions are super reliable. It is a highly scalable tool, specifically when the user has to face a scenario where the content handled grows in volume. Workflow is also a good feature of the tool. Recently, Liferay Objects was launched. Liferay Objects offers low code-no code capabilities, which are really good.

Our primary use case for this product is as a portal. This includes B2B portals, B2C portals, and B2E portals. It is good for any of those use cases. We have some solutions which include all three of these portal types in one deployment. It has the capability of providing good functionality for these portal types in a variety of ways. If you just need a marketing website, I'm not sure that you need a solution like Liferay Digital. You can just use WordPress which will serve your purpose in most cases. But if you need a website that has user authentication and you want to have additional functionalities like document storage, processes, forms, and generally more sophistication, you need a solution like Liferay.  

It is better to use a portal solution, and not only a content management system. That's my opinion.  

I think that manageability is very good and probably the most valuable part of a tool of this type. You can manage pages and you can manage the layout of each webpage. You can create templates very easily — content templates or page templates — and you can manage these in one place. It is a page management area. You do not have to go into management areas separately, you do not have to go to secondary pages to manage the system. So it is very easy for the administrative user.  

It is very scalable. On one deployment, you can create several solutions. It can be a website, it can be a portal, it can be an internal portal or intranet, and it can be a supplier portal. You can create all these various solutions and more on that one platform.  

Customers like it because they do not have separate solutions for all their needs. It is not just for a website, for example. They have a platform that they can use for many use cases at the same time and learn one tool. It is very flexible in that way.  

We have done things like putting two user directories in the portal which would allow us to work with several user groups, different user populations, and different kinds of users. One can be an internal user, one can be a supplier, or one can be a business partner. It gave us a good solution for that.  

There is a little more of a learning curve than you have with a simple tool, but a business user can learn to manage the system as an administrator very easily. Deployment is not too hard. That is why I think the main advantage of this kind of system is manageability.  

• Security: Authentication is just plug-and-play. Almost all types of mechanisms under the sun seem to be supported and a few could be used from a marketplace app.
• Authorization: With roles and permission, it is very fine grained to the data-level. The best part is that it provides easy APIs to use for custom apps, the way we want it.
• Themes: We can change practically anything of the look and feel of the portal. Customization is also pretty easy. The framework helps us to keep things separate from Liferay’s code base and yet achieve the desired results.
• Sites, Page and Content Creation: This was a breeze. This was as if I were creating a Word file on my file system and writing content to the Word file. We used it heavily. Not only that, we could bring our content live with ease by embedding JavaScript.
• Collaboration Features: Sharing and collaborating on Wikis and documents became much better by version 6.2, much to our relief.
• Hooks: We did some heavy customizations. Most of the customizations were plug-and-play with hooks. This is a really handy feature for developers.
• I have used other portals, but they don’t let you meddle with the portal. Liferay is different because it lets you do what you want to do with the portal.

Before Liferay, we had a lot of different sites. These included local setups for different purposes, and for same purposes, but with different locations.

We were having a hard time collaborating through external services like email, network-drives, and Google Drive.

Most of the time, the content history could not be tracked. This meant that we would have to check emails for approvals for a specific content and notifications etc.

But with Liferay, not only was collaboration streamlined, all audits are now in place, thanks to an easy Kaleo workflow.

The site-feature also makes it easier for bringing up another site within a day for a demo or other collaborations. Permissions can be set location wise and themes can be customized according to the user logged-in and by location.

We have two primary use cases for this solution between two installations. One is being used as a national business portal, and the other is used as an archival and preservation system.

The most valuable features are the content manager, where you can configure events, the archival and preservation feature, and the workflow feature where before the document is scanned and awaiting approval to be archived, the chief archivist can provide an opinion of whether the content is of preservation value or archival value. He puts a comment in the workflow.

We chose Liferay because it is open-source and that we can make any number of users apply, register into the system and use the system, as opposed to other solutions where the cost is based on user licenses.  This is one of the most attractive features.

• Web Content Management
• User Management

We utilize this product in multiple ways: for Web content management, inter-portlet communication, user management. LDAP is the most advantageous. All the portlets and widgets are plugins, which provides flexibility to add/modify in multiple ways. It’s user friendly and hence requires minimal knowledge to understand and operate it.

The features I find valuable are its integration points with other systems and scalability. This is important because the portal (Liferay) is an addition to the current J2EE Framework. That being said, it lends itself to roll all processing (Spring batch) into the Liferay Tomcat bundle. This process can be done in reverse order to ensure performance.

For integration points using simple plugins with SAP, you can create your own secure service bus for information. If you would like to convert your Liferay platform to a presentation layer for CRM, you can leverage Dynamic MS CRM or SugarCRM with ease using plugins or a Java framework.

Our organization benefited by the automated client setup and an easy CMS setup.

Student and staff facing self-serve portal with customized relevant data based on user's affiliation with the university.

Current management decided not to convert our student portal (Liferay 6.1) to Liferay DXP.  Instead, we opted for an in-house developed solution coded with Java and Aurelia with centralized data libraries accessible via APIs, Web Services, etc.  This provided our developers the unlimited ability to customize a lightweight solution which integrates with our SIS and other business/web applications.