Liferay and the Changing Role of the Enterprise Portal
On Tuesday, December 23rd, Michael Han from Liferay will join CMS-Connected live to discuss the role and impact of successful web portals. Register Here
This guest post contributed by James Falkner. Follow James at @schtool
Community Manager, Liferay, Inc.
Liferay Portal is an enterprise web platform for building business solutions that deliver immediate results and long-term value. In the 10 years we’ve been a portal, we’ve seen our industry, expand, collapse, and expand again, while at the same time witnessing the emergence of open source, big data, mobile, cloud, and other big trends that have impacted how portals are used. It’s also significantly raised expectations from IT, the C-suite, and in particular a new wave of developers that have cut their teeth on the web, rather than being dragged into it, and are becoming increasingly influential in purchasing decisions.
Related: Learn how enterprise web portals deliver strong customer experiences. Register for CMS-Connected; Enterprise Portals
As an open source and independently-funded company, Liferay is able to make quicker decisions that are best for our customers and community. As a result, we’ve been been able to offer real business value to enterprises, whether they are seeking traditional integration portals, collaboration sites, or a complete and modern mobile experience with multiple customer touchpoints using the latest frameworks and devices.
Enterprise portals
Yep, we do that. Liferay has built-in support for clustered portal nodes and session replication, 3 levels of distributed and extensible caching, identity integrations, app sandboxing, app hot deployments, content and document management, collaboration features, cascading portals, federated portals, headless portals, database sharding and read/write splitting, compatibility with industry load balancers, a pluggable enterprise search layer, pluggable workflow, pluggable authentication, diagnostic/reporting dashboards, user analytics, and auditing features, all of which can be monitored using industry-standard toolsets based on SNMP or JMX.
But it’s not enough anymore.
Owing to the economic uncertainty of the early 21st century, open source software (and Liferay in particular) was in a prime position to be the driving force behind many advancements, providing low-cost innovation in systems dominated by a few proprietary and expensive suppliers. A new breed of open source developers emerged from universities and began projects that today power the world’s most popular sites, and open source won, and we parlayed that success to meet the emerging technologies and increasing expectations that resulted.
Today, Liferay’s product portfolio works together to support our vision for Liferay as an enterprise web platform for building applications that support a company’s internal and external engagement initiatives. You can still use Liferay for a traditional portal, but our industry is increasingly seeing the need to provide much more value across a wider range of uses (of course, for the same cost!). a solid and complete mobile platform, more modular and serviceable architectures, advanced analytics, being able to make sense of the deluge of IoT data, digital marketing features like campaign management, A/B and multivariate testing, modern collaboration (not “Facebook for the enterprise”), and an embracing and supporting web technologies and modern JavaScript frameworks, rather than trying to hide behind a proprietary, “we know better” façade.
While they may use new terms to refer to it, the enterprise portal is alive and well, and is getting a serious makeover. It should be an interesting 2015!
Webinar: Learn how enterprise web portals deliver strong customer experiences. Register for CMS-Connected; Enterprise Portal's (December, 23)
Jade Carter
Jade is a content writer for CMS-Connected, facilitating the needs of the company blog. Bringing 10 years of Search and Digital Marketing to the table, he strives to build informative, relevant and fun editorial posts for the blog feed. Jade is an ultra distance (26.2 miles+) trail runner and lives to run trails in and around his home town of Victoria, BC.