Why Upgrade to Liferay Digital Experience Platform? The Right Solution for Your Future Challenges
Table of Contents Transform Your Business With a Modern Platform.............. 1 The Evolving Role of IT Leaders.............................. 1 Reduce Costs and Create New Services Quickly................. 2 Support for Your Unique Environment....................... 3 Advanced Tools for Performance Management............... 3 Flexible Development...................................... 3 Unify Customer Experience.................................... 4 User-Friendly Web Experiences and Content Creation......... 5 Personalized Campaigns With Content Targeting............. 5 Mobile-First Design......................................... 5 Boost Internal Collaboration.................................. 6 Surfacing Employee Knowledge and Collaboration........... 7 Gain Insight Through Forms and Workflows.................. 7 Intuitive Mobile Apps for Remote Workers.................... 7 Conclusion................................................... 8 What s Next?................................................. 8
Transform Your Business With a Modern Platform Many companies today are applying digital technology to their processes in order to stay competitive in today s market. A truly digital business isn t just more efficient. It s smarter, and by uniting systems, it s able to see emerging problems and fix them more quickly. Connecting systems, processes and people also enables you to fulfill customer promises and innovate new kinds of digital services. In order to advance as digital leaders, what businesses need today is a foundation that supports this process of digital transformation and innovation. This means a platform that is flexible, scalable and makes the most of the new technology available today. Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is designed to enable transformation and provide the features companies need to tackle specific challenges around cloud technology, digital tools for the workplace and customer experience initiatives. We consider Liferay DXP to be a massive evolution of our platform, one that gives our customers tangible benefits in today s market. An upgrade from Liferay Portal to Liferay DXP is an opportunity to prepare your business for incoming changes. The Evolving Role of IT Leaders According to a recent Gartner study, 41% of IT professionals believe their department is ready to tackle the new digital world. Specifically, almost 30% of them say that this is a top priority or that this occupies a large part of their responsibilities. What is the role of IT leaders in addressing this new digital world? Digital experiences today define the way in which customers interact with companies, and it s up to IT leaders to create the operational change necessary to deliver a superior customer experience. Their multipurpose role can act as a lever in the organization and will facilitate collaboration with different roles and departments on the road to digital transformation. IT is increasingly focused on fulfilling business needs with technologies that support omnichannel, personalization, automation, data analysis, and the convergence of offline and online channels. Some of the coming challenges are: Designing for efficient solutions to infrastructure needs. Building scalable solutions by integrating legacy systems. Reviewing department-specific technology to ensure that it is appropriate and integrated within the designed IT strategy. Reducing time to market for applications and business services. Integrating existing silos to make information accessible and reusable. Though Liferay began as a portal, we have continually expanded our functionality in order to meet our customers needs. Liferay DXP is the next evolution of what we ve always strived to provide for our customers: a technology platform that makes it easier to create a personalized, omnichannel experience for users, whether they are employees, customers or anyone else. The changes to Liferay DXP improve on existing features in Liferay Portal 6.2 Enterprise Edition (EE), adding new functionalities that the market has begun to demand, as well as compatibility with emerging technologies and platforms. To learn more about every new feature in Liferay DXP, read the New Features Summary. 1
Reduce Costs and Create New Services Quickly With the changing market demands, it is critical for core business software to support new technologies that increase efficiency and agility. With Liferay DXP, businesses can now take advantage of a modular architecture and best-in-class tools that allow them to innovate quickly as strategy evolves. The platform also enhances the cloud support that is available in previous versions of Liferay Portal, making this the most flexible and cutting-edge Liferay release. These technology improvements enable IT leaders to transform their core operational processes to achieve new levels of agility for their business.
Support for Your Unique Environment Liferay DXP supports both cloud-based and on-premise infrastructures, so that you aren t forced into one deployment strategy. Liferay DXP is also compatible with the latest Platforms as a Service, including Cloud Foundry, Bluemix and OpenShift, with the ability to deploy to both private clouds and public cloud infrastructures. There is no single strategy that is the best choice for every business, so our goal with Liferay DXP is to support the strategy you ve chosen for your unique environment, rather than what we think is best or easiest. Advanced Tools for Performance Management Through Liferay Connected Services (LCS), a cloud-based service that is included with Liferay DXP, businesses have greater control and closer monitoring over their platform s performance. LCS also provides access to fix pack management tools, maintenance updates, performance reports and support for auto-scaling rules. Flexible Development One of the major changes in Liferay DXP is the move to a modular architecture based on OSGi standards. Liferay s functionality has been distributed into hundreds of modules, allowing you to use only what you need for your project. This empowers businesses to build innovative applications and solutions for new challenges in the digital world, and facilitates the addition of new features, extensions and customizations that increase business agility. The OSGi framework provides new extensibility that streamlines platform development and increases application uptime. 3
Unify Customer Experience Improving customer experience at digital touchpoints continues to be one of the highest priorities for businesses today because of the potential for new business opportunities and increased revenue at each channel. Currently, that means implementing omnichannel strategies that allow customers to engage with your brand on every channel, according to their preference. Liferay DXP has features specifically designed to help you offer the right content, at the right moment, through the right channel, personalized for any customer you re hoping to reach.
User-Friendly Web Experiences and Content Creation Liferay DXP enhances the Web Experience Suite with a new set of modern themes and site templates. Creating dynamic and visually stunning sites for all channels is easier, for both developers and business end users. The interface for adding blogs or web content is much easier to learn thanks to improvements in the Alloy Editor and image editing tool, and speeds up the process by removing some of the unnecessary steps in Liferay Portal 6.2 EE. Personalized Campaigns With Content Targeting Liferay DXP also includes Audience Targeting 2.0, a new version of the Audience Targeting application. This enables businesses to use advanced audience segmentation in their marketing campaigns, supported by reporting capabilities that help you understand your customers preferences and engagement. As with other aspects of Liferay DXP, the Audience Targeting application is designed to match your process of creating campaigns. The process of creating segments and rules for showing content is fast and flexible, so that the end results truly match the strategy you want to implement. Mobile-First Design The most important digital touchpoint today is arguably smartphones, and every new idea for customer experience must include a way to optimize for mobile. Liferay Mobile Experience Suite builds out Liferay s core mobile features for implementing strategies for responsive websites, native apps and hybrid apps. Liferay DXP s main applications are all designed for mobile-first and are supplemented with important features like push notifications. These improvements accelerate the creation of native applications for an optimal user experience by providing reusable functionalities and leveraging the same business logic, content and forms created for the web. 5
Boost Internal Collaboration The consumer-friendly devices that your employees use outside of work set their expectations for tools in the digital workplace. Furthermore, enabling your employees to share knowledge through internal social media and collaboration sites has been shown to increase productivity by as much as 25%. For businesses planning to upgrade their current intranets, taking the time to re-equip and modernize their systems with new tools for a digital workspace can create lasting benefits without starting an entirely new project.
Surfacing Employee Knowledge and Collaboration Liferay DXP aids teamwork and collaborative cultures by giving users more ways to communicate and share information without resorting to external tools. In a normal work day, employees spend a good part of their time hunting down information from their coworkers, either in person or via email. Moving this communication to an internal collaboration site creates a searchable database for anyone else looking for the same information and reduces the amount of time spent searching. Versioning and commenting features also make it easy for teams to work together on developing and maintaining their knowledge base. In addition, the features in Liferay Social Office, which are now available in Liferay DXP, allow companies to create internal social networks that are secure and similar to other social media sites that employees enjoy using. Gain Insight Through Forms and Workflows Liferay DXP includes a brand new Forms application, making it much easier for users to quickly create forms or surveys. Creating surveys helps companies collect information from internal and external users, so they can act on this knowledge accordingly. The forms require no code to set up, so business or marketing users can implement these surveys on their own, without help from IT. By using a form application that is already integrated with your platform and workflows, you can automate the process of getting that data into the right system. Spend less time on manual entries and more time answering questions like how long it takes to onboard new hires or whether customer satisfaction is improving. Intuitive Mobile Apps for Remote Workers Liferay DXP continues to build on its long-standing mobile app features for workflow, document management and document sharing, all of which are important tools for remote employees. With Liferay Mobile Experience Suite, these and other web components can be easily pushed to a native mobile app, without having to recreate anything from scratch. Liferay DXP adds new screenlets and enterprise security features for mobile apps, as well as improved support for structured web content. Mobile apps can also utilize the features in Liferay Sync, a document management tool that allows access to assets via the cloud. This way, even remote Liferay users are able to reduce manual work and optimize information flow through different channels. 7
Conclusion Every new technology investment comes with both costs and opportunities. Upgrading to a platform like Liferay DXP makes it easier for companies to build cutting-edge applications on top of their current technology foundation. Having a flexible platform that facilitates innovation is key to taking advantage of future business opportunities and evolving your digital strategy. To create these new kinds of applications and services, it is critical that software development not get in the way of the release of new products. Your employees shouldn t be slowed down by clunky technology or legacy systems. Liferay DXP is designed to help businesses makes real transformation happen, so that they can be ready for any changes that come. What s Next? A successful upgrade requires an analysis of business requirements, careful planning, testing and execution. Learn key steps required for your migration, including a sample upgrade path, infrastructure changes, database upgrades and more. Read How to Upgrade to Liferay DXP 8
Liferay makes software that helps companies create digital experiences on web, mobile, and connected devices. Our platform is open source, which makes it more reliable, innovative and secure. We try to leave a positive mark on the world through business and technology. Companies such as Adidas, Carrefour, Cisco Systems, Danone, Fujitsu, Lufthansa Flight Training, Siemens, Société Générale and the United Nations use Liferay. Visit us at. 2017 Liferay, Inc. All rights reserved. 170704