With so many tools and technologies that promise to improve your organisation's performance online it can be difficult to know which would serve you best. To help you separate the wheat from the chaff, we're exploring Liferay’s digital experience platform – Liferay DXP.
In previous blog posts we’ve put Hippo CMS and Magento CMS through their paces to find out what benefits they offer businesses. Now, we're placing Liferay under the microscope and exploring its reputation as one of the premier digital experience (DX) platforms.
What is Liferay?
Although Liferay actually offers three distinct products, we’re going to focus solely on the Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP), simply because neither Liferay Analytics Cloud or Liferay Commerce are available on general release yet.
Simply put, DXP is an intelligent platform that empowers businesses to build portals, intranets, websites and connected experiences that employees, partners and customers actually want to use.
Highly-compatible with a wide range of third-party technologies, Liferay DXP enables users to create satisfying and enjoyable digital experiences across the entire customer journey – with over 60 tools to enable deep-customisation at every level, including an all-in-one developer environment.
What Functionality does Liferay DXP Provide?
Content Management
With Liferay DXP you’ll benefit from a content creation toolkit that rivals any of the leading CMSs on the market, without compromising on price or usability. From designing highly customisable templates and navigation, to setting up role-based content delivery that displays different content to different uses – using the same link.
Collaboration
From online forums and social media to content sharing tools and a company-wide knowledge base, Liferay makes it easier for your people to communicate and collaborate in the ways they feel most comfortable.
Digital Asset Management
As organisations become more global, it can often be tricky to ensure that everybody has access to the assets they require to their job. Digital Asset Management from Liferay empowers your people to share collateral via one central system from wherever they are in the world – without creating a sprawling mess of files.
Mobile Experience Platform
You can spend all the time in the world developing the most amazing UX imaginable but if you aren’t optimising it for mobile devices, a large portion of your audience are going to be let down. Liferay DXP gives you the tools you need to build responsive websites, portals, intranets and apps, ensuring users always receive an optimal experience, regardless of the device being used.
Developer Tools
No matter how many tools you have available to you, there will always come a time when you need that little bit of extra flexibility that simply isn’t offered by anything anybody else has developed. That’s why Liferay’s extensive developer toolkit provides everything you need to create exactly what you need.
The Benefits of Using Liferay
Widely-Compatible
While some solutions require you to invest in multiple platforms and connect them up to access a full suite of tools, Liferay DXP simply offers that functionality as standard.
Thanks to compatibility with all major OS, application servers and databases, DXP users are able to install and run the software in their current IT environment without your IT team needing to find their way around a new setup.
Highly Customisable
Rather than forcing your business to work inside the limits of new software, DXP’s library of components and features empower you to build exactly what you need – enabling you to create solutions that fit your business perfectly.
And if you’re struggling to develop the tool that you need, Liferay Marketplace has a wide range of themes, integrations and plugins ready to download. You can even pick up entire applications.
Simple to Use
Liferay DXP's impressive ease-of-use has undoubtedly played a large part in Liferay’s success. With simple drag-and-drop functionality and a what-you-see-is-what-you-get content editor, it’s simple to create the look and feel you want.
Agile
According to a recent survey of Liferay DXP users, more than half are utilising the platform for more than 1 purpose, with 13% having between 4-7 use cases – the most popular use being an organisation’s intranet or collaboration tool.
And if an organisation’s needs change, it only takes a handful of clicks to add new functionality. Suddenly, that intranet is an extranet for partners to log into because Liferay is an investment that evolves with your organisation!
Developer-Friendly
Not only does Liferay deliver amazing user experiences, but it’s a dream for developers to work with too. And your development team will be able to get started quickly thanks to the stunningly easy installation process and flexible deployment options offered by DXP – whether you’re architecture is on-premises or in the cloud.
There’s no reason to stop using the technology you’re familiar with either because the DXP solution supports a wide variety of developer languages and UI frameworks including:
- Java
- JSF
- Lexicon
- Groovy
- GWT
- JQuery
- Twitter Bootstrap Metal.js
- ReactJS
- AngularJS
- js
- js
- Lodash
- Vaadin
- Ruby
- Scala
- And many others
A True Leader of the Digital Experience Sector
As you can see, we’re pretty convinced of Liferay DXP’s ability to empower businesses to build the user experiences that will set them apart from the competition. But, if you’re not swayed by our argument you should at least listen to the experts.
There can be little doubt that when it comes to tech, Gartner certainly know their stuff and they recently named Liferay a leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms. Now that’s a vote of confidence you can trust!
Click here to find out more about what it takes to create great customer experiences online.
https://www.liferay.com/company/gartner/magic-quadrant-digital-experience-platforms
