Shayne Tanner (General Manager, Permeance) and I were lucky enough to attend the recent Liferay ECS held at the National Conference Centre in Virginia (outer Washington DC). It was a 2 day event that had presentations from Liferay, Liferay partners and specialist product vendors that use Liferay. For Permeance, it was a great opportunity to meet up with the Liferay founders and other key contacts we work with on a day-to-day basis.
This was our first visit to a Liferay Symposium, and while it may seem strange that we were not presenting or using it as an opportunity to meet new customers, our intent was to observe and learn more about Liferay as a company and its people. Of course, any extra knowledge on Liferay portal was always going to be a bonus. In summary, Liferay has built a great company that value quality over profits and truly believe in the spirit of Open Source and embracing community contribution.
While there was no major product announcements at this Symposium for Liferay Portal, it was really interesting to see the great ways organisations around the globe are making use of the product, a good example of this is Endeca's MDEX engine. It was confirmation for me that the work we are doing with Liferay is some of the best in world and that our company has a great understanding and appreciation of the product.
One new key offering announced by Liferay is the introduction of a new Market Place where organisations around the globe can create and sell their product to the Liferay user community. Working similar to other app stores, product creators upload their product, Liferay validate and confirm it's quality and when made available consumers can simply download and install in their portal environment. I see this as a great opportunity to market our capabilities and share some of the experience we have had in tweaking Liferay and integrating other systems.
The symposium was wide reaching with two tracks, one technical and one business focused. Liferay has some great features in their roadmap. One key area of improvement to Liferay is with the Web Content Management system. Our background is Enterprise Content Management so this was music to our ears. Finally, we call Content Structures, Content Types and we can now define a default context for a web content item. The authoring process and overall user experience is to be improved and extensions to the asset publisher supporting content types. Extending search capabilities are welcomed and having the ability to now facet search results will be a blessing to our education clients.
For our developers, there are some very interesting features coming in Liferay IDE and Liferay Studio. Integration with Amazon beanstalk for Cloud developer services has the "cool" factor and simple improvements for productivity e.g. better Alloy UI interaction, I am sure will be welcomed by the development community.
When performance and scalability are always at the front of your mind like it is for the Permeance architecture team, it's great to see Lifeary are working with companies like Azul and are increasing their benchmark testing from 1 million to 10 million users.
The symposium has shown me that Liferay are listening to their customers and community. They are agile and have a release early and release often policy supported by their Community Edition. As an Enterprise Edtion reseller, we want consistent releases with quality and great new features, Liferay gives us both. What we will do now as a company is contribute more back to Liferay in ways of feature requests, changes requests and feature development.
Bryan Cheung, CEO and Founder of Liferay closed out the symposium with a great keynote drawing parallels from other industries to demonstrate Liferays value proposition and their vision for Liferay as the a platform for social collaboration.
So in summary, lets get a symposium scheduled in Australia!
