Digital Experiences are everywhere. You’re likely reading this on your tablet or phone and this blog was written on my laptop – digital experiences surround us. I think about this quite a bit, especially when I think about my children. The younger generation doesn’t even know a world without instant access to anything and everything. Got five minutes of downtime? Pull out your phone and watch a video or check your social media. In fact, this drives me crazy with my kids. I’m firmly convinced they don’t know how to be bored and why boredom can lead to new creativity, amongst other good things. But I’m digressing from the topic at hand and will have to explore that topic in another blog.
Per Gartner, a digital experience platform (DXP) is defined as an “integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform, that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure, and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints.” What does this mean? Essentially, a DXP is a group of technologies that work with one another to serve customers, partners, employees and other interested stakeholders seamlessly across various digital experiences.
Currently, there are multiple options for choosing your digital experience platform; our favorite is Liferay DXP. Liferay DXP allows you to create connected experiences on an integrated platform and allows developers to rapidly create a solution with the ability to quickly update, scale and manage your digital experience for your customers and users. As your company’s needs change, your digital experience can evolve with your business.
As an IT professional, I have been in this industry for 22+ years and have designed solutions on a variety of Portal and DXP platforms. Over the years, I’ve worked on products from all the major vendors – they each have their own pros/cons. Following is my personal list of reasons as to why Liferay DXP is the optimal choice for managing your company’s digital experience.
1. Liferay is a flexible platform
- Liferay DXP simplifies development of different user interfaces and enables you to seamlessly integrate all interfaces together for your customers.
- The most common use cases are the digital workplace, self-service customer portals, extranets, public websites, integration platforms, mobile applications, campus portals, and learning management systems. These use cases cover a wide variety of industries and show Liferay’s versatility in that it can be used to specifically tailor a solution best suited for your business.
- Per Gartner, “Liferay shines when its technology is used to build highly customized experiences that incorporate external business applications.“
- Liferay is incredibly agile and supports flexible architectures and modern web development approaches, such as React and Angular.
2. Strong Roots in Portal and Content Management
- Liferay has been around since 2000 and has consistently worked on creating enterprise portal solutions. Accordingly, Liferay has continued to improve their product with new features and enhancements. As a result, Liferay has shifted away from mere portal solutions with the advent of the more comprehensive Liferay DXP.
- Liferay DXP has Out Of The Box (OOTB) functionality that will help to quickly create your solution and enable you to get the most from your experience.
- Liferay DXP allows you to view usage statistics on content for analysis and performance refinement.
- Liferay DXP understands content management and has built the system to accommodate all aspects of content management, including version control, permissions, etc. Even more, Liferay made it intuitive for non-technical personnel to use to reduce IT intervention in creating campaigns, workflows, etc..
3. Innovation
- Liferay is continuously innovating and creating new features to expand their platform’s capabilities which, inherently, expands capabilities for solutions. As Liferay continues to innovate, you continue to gain access to new and enhanced features as they are released.
- Liferay has enhanced features like Audience Targeting and Liferay Forms in each v7.x release. The most recent features introduced include Liferay Commerce and Liferay DXP Cloud.
- Liferay creates its own new features rather than innovating through acquisitions for seamless integration. Often, Liferay creates new features and functionality based on customer requests. Liferay Commerce is a great example of this innovation. Rather than purchase another company and stitch it into Liferay, they developed their Commerce platform from the ground up to be a harmonious part of Liferay DXP’s ecosystem.
4. Cohesive Product Created Through Organic Innovation
- Liferay DXP is NOT a hodgepodge of acquired products stitched together loosely. Instead, Liferay DXP is a cohesive DXP platform developed through organic innovation over time.
- Each feature within Liferay was designed and developed specifically for Liferay. This is a huge advantage that is often overlooked. As a result, each feature works seamlessly together within the overall product. As previously mentioned, Liferay Commerce is just one example of this kind of thoughtful development.
- Liferay Analytics Cloud is another great example of systemic cohesion. Yes, you can easily integrate Google Analytics into Liferay DXP (it’s as simple as adding your GA-ID into control panel). However, Liferay Analytics Cloud is more than page tracking. It provides a much deeper insight into how your customers are leveraging your DXP solution. This is a relatively new offering and we are excited to see how this feature matures.
5. Lower Total Cost of Ownership
- Liferay can be downloaded and running within minutes.
- Liferay has an extremely large list of OOTB features and an extensive marketplace with downloadable modules, many of which are free.
- Your savings continue through lower development costs, operational costs, and training costs.
- XTIVIA provides open source development accelerators such as XTIVIA Jetray and XTIVIA Jetspeed for rapid creation, development and deployment of Angular/React-based portlets and services.
The list above demonstrates that Liferay DXP is a strong digital experience platform for your business both now and in the years to come. At XTIVIA, we specialize in the digital experience platform space and, in particular, Liferay; we would love to talk with you more about your current digital experience needs and issues. We can help you deliver the right digital experience solution to achieve your goals.
If you have questions on how you can best leverage your Liferay DXP implementation, please engage with us via comments on this blog post, or reach out to us.
Additional Reading
You can also continue to explore Liferay DXP by checking out Migrating to Liferay DXP, The Benefits of Liferay for Digital Workplace Development, The Top 10 New Features in Liferay DXP, and at our website.