Digital transformation continues to be one of the hottest trends in the technology press, with authors in CIO, Forbes, and ZDNet offering their predictions for digital transformation in 2019. Not only is digital transformation a much talked-about topic in the press, it continues to be an area of real need and demand among our customers as well.
In my capacity as CTO and VP, Digital Experience Solutions, at XTIVIA I work hand-in-hand with enterprises as they seek to meet their customers’ expectations by reinventing themselves and becoming as frictionless as possible in their customer experience. While enterprises often tend to focus on external customers (and rightly so), it is just as important to increase the productivity of their internal customers by investing in digital workplaces. In practice, this often entails the creation – or revitalization – of a corporate intranet. For that, there’s one tool I continue to prefer above all others: Liferay.
I began using Liferay for intranet development back in 2006 and have never looked back. Liferay has grown over the years into a modern digital experience platform that can support multiple digital experience use cases; serving as the foundation of a digital workplace is one of those key use cases. Here’s why:
- Content Management: Liferay CMS (content management system) offers best-in-class support for web content, documents, images, and video plus collaboration tools like knowledge bases, blogs, and forums. Content management in Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is characterized by a separation of content authoring and presentation. This allows management, corporate communications, Human Resources (HR), and others to quickly and easily create new and relevant content while developers and designers are able to focus on creating the experiences they want and enforce brand consistency.
- Personalization: Different users need to be presented with different content for relevance and have permissions assigned to them based on their role within an organization. Liferay DXP allows administrators to determine enterprise content policy through a centralized platform, including who can edit and publish content, files, communities, and applications. Multiple user types can access a single URL and see a unique page view depending on their role, group, organization, and personal preferences.
In addition, Liferay offers an audience targeting capability that allows you to divide your audience into user segments, target specific content to different user segments, and create campaigns for different user segments. It also allows you to quickly measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. User segments allow you to configure your intranet to display different assets to different users based on information you have about the user (such as department, job role, location, and more) as well as user behavior (what pages and content have they visited). Campaigns allow you to display specific content to different user segments for fixed periods of time.
A hyper-personalized user experience enables your employees to quickly find the information and tools they need without information overload, thereby creating operational efficiencies and happier employees.
- Integrations & Security: Liferay DXP is a flexible platform with out-of-the-box connectors for Documentum, Google Drive, and SharePoint. For security, Liferay DXP supports integration with Active Directory and LDAP in order to support the authentication and authorization of all users and devices within a network. Liferay DXP further lets IT unite all corporate sites for employees using a single login and password with support for SSO (single sign-on) tools like OpenID, Open Authorization (OAuth), SAML, Shibboleth, Google, and SSO servers.
- Mobile-Friendly: Today’s world is mobile-first and any solution for a modern digital workplace needs to support a multi-device strategy. Fortunately, Liferay Screens offers a collection of native mobile components designed to increase the velocity of mobile application development. With Liferay Screens, developers can easily reuse functionality developed for the web within mobile devices without the need to rewrite code. In addition, sites built on Liferay DXP are mobile responsive by default, with the platform’s CSS framework designed to work with browsers on all platforms.
- Customization: Everything in Liferay DXP – from the theming to the user interface – is customizable so organizations can deliver experiences that perfectly match their brand and tone. Internal communication teams and other content creators are empowered to customize pages by adding, removing, and positioning content or applications, subject to administrator approval. Another angle of customization is the ability to customize Liferay’s behavior to fit your organization’s needs – this is an area where Liferay shines by providing a modular architecture that enables you to customize functionality in an upgrade-friendly manner.
The content authoring experience in Liferay includes support for key features like WYSIWYG content authoring/editing, versioning, comparisons, commenting, scheduling, and subscriptions designed to keep contributors in the know. Liferay’s custom Workflows ensure a designated approval process is followed and required checks are completed before content is published.
Tying this back to a modern digital workplace, Liferay’s CMS enables all employees to have direct, easy access to accurate shared information and tools to support and efficiently complete work which, in turn, facilitates a positive work environment. Additionally, Liferay’s collaboration tools facilitate data sharing for departments, teams, and projects and assist new employees as they learn the culture and values of the organization.
In short, Liferay DXP offers one of the most robust, flexible paths to create a digital workplace in the enterprise. As a bonus, the open source nature of Liferay DXP means customers don’t have to fear getting trapped in an expensive proprietary stack but, instead, have the advantage of a cost-effective solution that allows them to benefit from the contributions of a diverse global community of thousands of developers worldwide. As a result, Liferay DXP should be at the top of the list for anyone thinking about deploying, or refreshing, a digital workplace such as an intranet or employee portal.