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Liferay DXP 7.1 – Liferay Releases New Products To Help Your Enterprise

This is an exciting time for Veriday and its customers. Having been a Liferay Partner for over ten years, we are excited to see the progression of growth of Liferay’s world-class products. Last week, Liferay announced the launch of new Digital Experience products to support the complete customer journey, an upgraded Digital Experience Platform 7.1 and two new products, Commerce and Analytics Cloud.

The latest version of Liferay DXP coupled with the Analytics Cloud and Commerce products gives enterprises a new way to engage customers that includes a B2C-like purchasing journey but for B2B customers that is fully integrated. You can read the full press release or we’ve summarized it nicely below. 

Liferay DXP 7.1

 

Flexible Solution Building Software.

 

Why Liferay DXP
Regardless of what challenge an enterprise is facing, there tailored solutions that fit your business. Even if there are already existing technologies being used, Liferay integrates with everything so you are not locked into buying software with one vendor. Through Liferay DXP, clients have been using it to support, on board and retain employees, vendors, and customers throughout their entire journey.

  • Personalized dynamic forms: Forms in Liferay DXP 7.1 are designed to be extremely flexible so that businesses can deliver personalized experiences specifically designed for their customer base.
  • Flexible page creation: With Liferay DXP 7.1 teams save time and have the flexibility to create the pages they want by storing page sections as “fragments” and reusing them anywhere within their Liferay site.
  • Improved mobile and cross-platform development: In order to decrease time to production, developers working with Liferay DXP 7.1 can use Apache Cordova or Xamarin to build cross-platform applications from a single code base designed for the web.

Liferay Commerce

Digital commerce experience that makes you better to do business with.

The Liferay Team is excited to launch their new product Liferay Commerce. With this product, enterprises can ultimately make customer experiences your competitive advantage, where the e-commerce experience is one that will keep customers coming back. Improve the entire purchasing experience with easy browsing, simplified checkout, easy reorders and tailored price lists.    

How Liferay Commerce can improve your digital commerce experience:

  • Transform Experience: Revitalize your digital commerce with modern and engaging websites.
  • Increase Adoption and Sales: Replace administrative tasks as part of the ordering system with an easy B2B purchasing
  • Earn Customer Loyalty: Creates sites that customers enjoy using and makes it easy for them to return for repeat business.
  • Fully Integrated: Built from the ground up to work with Liferay DXP so there is less time trying to integrate and more time improving and growing.

Built for B2B

  • Contract Pricing
  • Organizational Hierarchy
  • Piers Tiers
  • Site Initializers for Wholesale and Manufacturing
  • Order Workflows
  • Customer-Specific Catalogues
  •  Order Forecasting

Liferay Analytics Cloud

Discover insights into the modern customer journey.

With the new Liferay Analytics Cloud product, enterprises can leverage the power of their analytics connected right to their Liferay DXP platform, making it easy to see detailed insights.

Enhance enterprise digital marketing with analytics that aggregate and visualize customer profile data and marketing performance for deep insights.

How Liferay Analytics Cloud helps businesses deliver the right content to the right audience:

  • Customer Profile Analytics: Extract customer data from multiple sources to get in-depth knowledge on users
  • Touchpoint Analytics: Measure individual touchpoint performance to improve the digital experience
  • Traffic and Path Analytics: Display and filter traffic types and visualize a customer path
  • Asset Analytics: Track and visualize engagements levels for all assets including forms, blogs, media, etc.

Liferay DXP 7.1

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How an Intranet Can Elevate Employee Engagement

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Over the last few years, intranet technology has evolved tremendously. From a simple online notice board to a technological opportunity with endless capabilities. Intranets have the ability to elevate employee engagement, enhance customer experience, and so much more.

According to Dale Carnegie, 90% of leaders think an engagement strategy will have an impact on business success, but only about 25% of business leaders have an employee engagement strategy.  Some other interesting statistics include:

  • Only 40% of the workforce knows their company’s goals, strategies, and tactics (Dale Carnegie)
  • 49% of employees are “not engaged” and 16.5% are “actively disengaged” (Gallup)
  • Companies with engaged employees earn 2.5 times more revenue compared to their competitors with low engagement levels (Officevibe)
  • 90% of companies using social technologies report business benefit from them including an 18% higher revenue per employee (Jive Software)

So, how can an intranet elevate employee engagement across your organization? This article will discuss how embracing technology can lead the way to employee engagement and higher productivity.

Centralize information

Digital isn’t just about marketing. An intranet can work across all departments, from sales and marketing to support and operations. It brings everyone in your organization together as you work to exceed client needs. One aspect of an intranet is the centralization of company information. Centralizing your organization’s information can help to improve the accessibility of information, and thus the productivity of your employees.

Accessibility

Working in a large organization, it can be frustrating when you require different logins, passwords, or applications in order to gain access to pertinent information. The good news is that modern intranets can help to empower employees with accessibility to information and insight. Intranets can centralize all pertinent information within a single login and application. On top of that, it can be accessible to every individual in your organization – not just those in the C-suite. According to Jive Software, using an intranet can reduce email use by 25% by minimizing “locked up” information in inboxes and folders.

On another note, the Internet has eliminated the significance of geography, and it’s now easier than ever for employees to work remotely. Centralizing your organization’s information, using an intranet, can make information accessible 24/7 to everyone in your organization, regardless of geography and time zone. This can elevate your employee engagement as it helps employees do their jobs more efficiently by having all of the information in one place, rather than moving from program to program or hunting down individuals with that information.

Within every organization, there is sensitive or confidential information that is only accessible to certain individuals. With an intranet, you have the ability to implement a role-based information setting, meaning that sensitive information can be made accessible to certain individuals based on their role within the organization. Intranets also support organization hierarchy so that you can easily accommodate formal organizations and informal teams of any size.

Productivity

69% of employees surveyed agreed that intranets help reduce unnecessary email and improve efficiencies within their organization (Jive Software). An intranet can help your employees make decisions, author content, and share information and ideas.

With tools like blogs, forums, wikis, and knowledge base, employees are able to share and grow their knowledge. A well-built intranet that includes some, if not all of these tools, has the ability to streamline entire business processes. With the ability to add, edit, share and collaborate real-time on essential data and projects, your employees can resolve problems more quickly. As a result, this will increase your productivity levels and help elevate your employee engagement rate.

Personalization leads to higher productivity

Personalization involves building an intranet that allows each employee to have a dashboard that they can customize to their interests, preferences, and job. Allowing your employees to add a personal touch to their intranet view can create several benefits such as improved company culture, increased levels of employee engagement and productivity, and easier navigation. Personalization can lead to higher productivity because employees are more informed, motivated and engaged.

You can also reflect your organization’s culture throughout your intranet through its branding, colour scheme, content, processes and contributions from employees. The best kind of intranet is not only aligned with your current organizational culture, but also continues to shape and influence it. There are different ways to promote a positive company culture through your social intranet including:

  • Sharing company news
  • Highlighting internal job opportunities
  • Feature stories focused on employees
  • Focus on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives
  • Share your organizations history and heritage
  • Broadcast company and individual accomplishments
  • Contests/gamification
  • Ask employees for feedback
  • List community events
  • Q&A forums
  • Employee profiles

Modern intranets are easy to use and empower employees with information and insight. When effectively developed and utilized, an intranet can produce endless opportunities and benefits to your organization. Intranets have the ability to centralize your information, increase your employee engagement, collaboration, and productivity levels, promote a positive company culture, and help your organization gain a competitive edge.

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Has employee engagement become an issue within your organization? If the answer is yes, it may be time to search for a solution that can help to drive your employee engagement. As an organization, it can be difficult to choose a technology solution that best fits your business. Many organizations are turning to Liferay, a leading open source platform, to help them build a fully integrated intranet that connects their people and systems. For more information, feel free to reach out to us.

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4 Benefits of a Content Management System (CMS)

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According to TechTarget, a content management system (SMS) is a system used to manage the content of a website. Using a CMS to power your website could be one of the best investments you make for your website and business. Although, a CMS can be a steep investment, it can also be a great asset to your business in the long run.

In a digitally-centric world, your organizations website is one of your main communication tools with your clients, prospects, and the rest of the digital world – so you want to make sure your audience loves your website. CMS is a web program that allows users to easily create, modify and maintain content from a single interface. Below are 4 benefits of investing in a CMS for your organizations website.

  1. Boosts productivity

Have you ever had to go through your IT department to make a change to your organization’s website? Something as simple as adding a new blog post, changing an image, or updating information? Going through this process can be daunting as it has to go through several people in your organization to make the simplest changes.A good CMS is user friendly and enables people, including those without a coding background, to make changes quickly. Having a good CMS helps boost your organizations productivity levels by streamlining website changes (and more).

  1. Allows multiple users

In an organization, there are many employees who have input into your website – the creative director, marketing team, developers, and so on. A CMS makes it easy to manage different roles and permissions for each user, whether they need to produce and publish blog posts for your content marketing efforts, give your website a fresh new look, or change the layout entirely.

  1. It’s easy to use for the non-technically minded

Not everyone has the same skills and comfort level with technology. Working with a CMS allows those without a design or developing background to easily create functional pages and update them periodically without having to depend on back-end developers. CMS functions like writing and publishing content are easy to grasp for everyone, so you don’t have to worry about spending too much time on training.

  1. Easier access to content

According to SER Group, businesses spend 30% of their working time searching for “locked up” information. With so much time being spent searching for that information, an organizations profitability and efficiency decreases. A CMS makes it simple to share, reuse and search for content throughout the system, ensuring that the data is available to everyone who needs it. This heightens the effectiveness of your employees and helps in decreasing total costs for your organization.

Although there are many benefits that a CMS can bring to your organization, not all CMS systems are effective.

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3 Key Benefits for Digital Experience Platforms

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This post was written by Christine Reyes and appeared here first on Liferay.com.

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Business processes driven by customer needs are more than a popular trend; they are the driving factor behind successful digital transformation and company culture shifts.

Digital experience platforms are designed for companies that understand the importance of breaking down silos and bringing together data and channels in a way that can be shared among business units. Common features include analytics, customer context views, personalization and multichannel support.

Their goal is to enable companies to manage the elements of exceptional experiences with a clear view of business analytics, integration, comprehensive customer data and cost-effective implementation. Further benefits of digital experience platforms to digital businesses include the following:

1. Identify immediate needs in digital customer experience

As digital business becomes more personalized and unified across devices, it becomes increasingly important to interact with people at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Sophisticated data management streamlines the process of identifying customer pain points or gaps in communication, which can then be leveraged to improve digital experiences. This prioritizes what customers want without locking companies down to any specific technology or type of interaction.

Once companies identify immediate needs in digital customer experience, they can act on them from a place of knowledge, rather than trying to build strategies off of incomplete data. A digital experience platform will then be able to provide tools or integrate with the correct external products to address these needs.

2. Improve the accuracy of your marketing and customer engagement through holistic customer data and information

The first step to improving experiences is to offer the omnichannel interaction, and the second step is to constantly track, measure and analyze so that customer engagement can grow and evolve.

Digital experience platforms allow companies to track customer behavior at each digital touchpoint. As the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, companies will have access to more channels of customer data, enabling them to draw new insights. The goal is to discover patterns in customer behavior and constantly improve customers’ experiences, even before they ask for it.

Customer data can include basic contact information, demographic snapshots, psychographic data points such as details about personalities or lifestyles, transactional data, communications history with the brand, account preferences, responses to marketing campaigns, and site engagement tracked through clicks, browsing time and social media shares.

A digital experience platform will pull this data into one place that each department can access as needed through customized views. This ensures that the entire company is working with consistent, updated information and basing decisions on accurate, holistic insights.

3. Use integration and flexible architecture to stay on the cutting-edge of digital trends

A common burden of technology upgrades is the unforeseen costs when development takes longer or is more complex than planned. If a digital experience platform achieves an effective level of integration and flexibility, then it will be cost-effective over time.

Veterans of digital change know that a technology upgrade can take months or even years. Sometimes, by the time you get the technology and strategy right, the trend is in its last days and the industry leaders are already gearing up for the next change. This makes it risky to pursue any new digital trend, because it may have evaporated by the time your company finally gets the fancy new software configured for your needs.

In today’s quickly changing digital environment, vendor lock-in is a handicap, and any digital experience platform should also make it easy to integrate with outside products, not just the vendor’s own offerings.

Because a digital experience platform starts with the core components in one place and product, it would be a cost-effective, long-term investment that mitigates the risk in acting on a digital trend. This could potentially level the playing field for companies that don’t have the largest budget, provided they have the foresight and agility to respond to the shifting sands of the market.

Final Thoughts

A digital experience platform provides the capabilities that you need to produce a variety of user-facing experiences. The exact tools offered will differ by vendor, and it is up to companies to assess their goals and determine which components are required for their strategy. However, the unifying principle for digital experience platforms will remain the same: architecture that integrates core business tools and provides a foundation for future digital innovation.

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DXP: Digital Experience Platform

Read more about the digital transformation and how you can create customer-first digital experiences. Download Liferay’s Digital Experience Platform whitepaper.

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A Conversation with Customers: Liferay Digital Experience Platform

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This post was authored by Bryan Cheung and appeared here first on Liferay.com.

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The internet has changed the way we live because it gives everyone an equal voice in a global conversation. No matter who you are or where you live, you can make yourself heard, whether by contributing to Wikipedia, creating a video that goes viral on social media, or corresponding personally with people and organizations around the world.

And yet it still seems like so much shouting is going on, and not enough listening. One of the areas we see this is with companies and how they interact with their customers.

As companies, we have a bigger opportunity than ever before to hear our customers—to understand the problems they face, and give them the right solution to make their lives easier. That might be your next great product, but it might also be a simple phone call or email giving them some advice or help.

Unfortunately, too many companies today are overloading their customers with emails, offers, and content that reflect the company’s priorities rather than meeting the customer’s needs. These companies see digital technology as just another channel through which to talk at their customers.

That’s why we are happy to announce today the launch of Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP). With Liferay DXP, we asked ourselves, “How can we help companies do a better job of listening?” Liferay DXP helps your customers have a conversation with you, to make their needs heard and give you a chance to meet them.

It’s also important for the customer’s feedback to make an impact on your actual business operations. Liferay DXP isn’t just about surface level interactions. With our portal heritage, we’re able to integrate those interactions into your business operations, updating customer records, getting workflows going, and sending up-to-date information back to the customer.

And finally, in a world where customer data is increasingly being treated as a commodity to monetize, Liferay DXP seeks to give companies the tools needed to handle their customer’s data securely and sensitively. We want to encourage properly handling and processing data in a way that’s right by the customer.

Over the past 15 years, Liferay has been trying to find ways to make technology work better for people. As an open source company, we made sure the software we built met the needs of real users and customers. As a portal provider, we did this by matching people to the content and applications that suited their role in an organization.

And while making things friendly and easy for regular people, we also made sure to adhere to the stringent security requirements of our toughest customers.

We see Liferay Digital Experience Platform as the next logical step in our evolution as a company, and I hope that we’ve done a good job listening to your needs as we’ve designed our product.

 

Here’s Liferay’s official press release.

 

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Liferay Announces a Platform for the Digital Enterprise

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This article originally appeared here on www.liferay.com

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Liferay Digital Experience Platform helps improve customer experiences by bridging organizational silos and processes

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — (May 3, 2016) — Liferay, Inc., which makes software for enterprises, announced today the Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP), designed to help companies create and manage experiences that support the end-to-end customer relationship. With Liferay DXP, digital innovation leaders can enable every business unit in the enterprise to serve the customer consistently, by integrating deeply with business operations and building an understanding of the customer with every interaction.

“Businesses today are moving beyond a narrow focus on marketing to look at the whole experience of their customers,” said Edwin Chung, VP of Product Management for Liferay. “Liferay DXP helps companies present the right personalized experience for the moment: frustrated customers need help, not targeted offers, while a great service experience is an opportunity to upsell. By deeply integrating with the systems that support business units and processes, companies can act on customer sentiment and history to give customers the right resource or offer when they’re ready for it.”

A recent Forrester study* found that the No. 1 technical barrier facing digital experience leaders was inadequate integration with backend systems. Customers expect to have ready access to information locked in these systems, including order status, issues reported, profile information and a history of interactions. The brands that earn customer loyalties will be those that have all enterprise resources and departments available to help the customer. But while many CMS and DXP vendors use targeted content and offers to drive sales, they often fall short of nurturing the relationship with deeper interactions that tie into a company’s business operations.

With Liferay DXP, sales, marketing, support and service teams can truly work together for the customer. The Liferay platform assembles a comprehensive view of the customer from separate systems, uses that insight to improve customer interactions, and integrates those interactions to the company’s operations. Liferay DXP also enables partners and employees to interact with customers to influence sentiment and support the relationship.

Liferay DXP provides:

  • Flexible architecture for transformation: Liferay allows you to quickly implement digital strategy and adapt to new digital technologies with reusable microservices and integration with existing applications.
  • Experience management: Customer-facing business units that touch customers can design highly personalized experiences, from marketing campaigns to customer service processes, by targeting useful information, offers, and resources to user segments and individuals.
  • Single view of the customer: Liferay DXP creates a single customer profile aggregated from all of the customer’s interactions with the company, along with important data points such as customer sentiment, interests and significant conversions.
  • Engagement data: Improve customer experiences with access to engagement data such as video content views, click-throughs on targeted content, community activity and social metadata.
  • Support for innovative interfaces: DXP is designed to be used with modern UI and app frameworks favored by savvy front-end and mobile developers

For more information about the Liferay Digital Experience Platform, please visit liferay.com/digital-experience-platform.

Product Availability:

Liferay DXP will be available for purchase at the end of May 2016.

*Grannan, Mark, et al., “Vendor Landscape: Digital Experience Portals,” Forrester Research, Inc., January 4, 2016

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About Liferay

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 www.liferay.com.

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Top 4 Reasons to Attend Intra.NET Reloaded in Boston

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Intra.NET Reloaded is a 2-day conference focused on defining the future of the digital workplace. This conference brings together over 100 decision makers from corporate IT, Communications and Business departments who are responsible for creating tomorrow’s digital workplace to network, partner and exchange knowledge in a unique event format. This year it is taking place from April 21 – 22nd, 2016 at the Hyatt Boston Harbor, Massachusetts.

Veriday is delighted to be co-sponsoring and speaking at this year’s conference with our technology partner, Liferay. The 2-day event is a combination of inspirational keynotes and well moderated, interactive World Café Sessions, workshops, break outs, roundtable discussions and activities.

So, why attend Intra.NET Reloaded?  Here are four reasons to join Veriday at the biggest intranet-, digital workplace and social collaboration event in the US:

  1. Connect with others

Attending this conference will connect you with over 100 decisions makers from a wide range of industries. Through sessions ranging from workshops, roundtable discussion and purely networking-focused activities, networking is highly encouraged and made easy for everyone.

Intra.Net pie chart showing job function demographic and industry split.

  1. Expand your knowledge

Learn from more than 30 industry-leading speakers, including Veriday’s CEO, Marc Lamoureux. At Intra.NET Reloaded, you will have the opportunity to go through real case studies, participate in supportive workshops and breakout sessions that will bring you closer to the best solutions for leveraging the business value of intranets and collaboration platforms.

  1. Discover the newest technologies

Attending this conference will enable you to gain insights from your competitors’ experiences with intranet platforms, tools and technologies. You will have to opportunity to share best practices and benchmark experience with individuals working within your industry. The Intra.NET Reloaded conference will provide you with a chance to discuss upcoming trends and opportunities in your industry to increase the business value of your company’s tools and technologies.

  1. Why not?

What do you have to lose? Intra.NET Reloaded will push you to discover new ways to break down silos and organizational barriers, collaborate with peers on shared problems and reflect on how to best exploit current technologies.

Join Veriday as we help celebrate, discover and shape the future of intranets, the digital workplace, and collaboration platforms at this years Intra.NET Reloaded conference.

Come Say Hello!

Come and chat with the Veriday and Liferay team, at our booth, to discover how your organization can implement and maintain an effective and value-adding alignment to your Digital Workplace.  If you are interested in attending, please contact us to receive our sponsorship discount code.

We look forward to seeing you at this years Intra.NET Reloaded conference!

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About Intra.NET Reloaded

Intra.NET Reloaded is the annual leading event on digital workplace transformation and connects IT, internal communication, and business leaders across industries to bridge existing gaps and discover opportunities of intranet, digital workplace and collaboration platform projects.

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Liferay Vs. SharePoint: Who is using these technologies?

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Portals continue to evolve as platforms gain new features that increasingly blur the boundaries between portals and areas such as content management. Customer experience, customer engagement, digital experience and marketing integration have been a large focus of portal platforms for the past couple of years as more and more enterprises have embarked on portal implementations. Today we will examine Liferay Vs. Sharepoint

Earlier this year, Gartner released its latest Magic Quadrant for horizontal portals. Microsoft SharePoint and Liferay were both named in the top 5 for leaders in horizontal portals.   But, who exactly is using Liferay and SharePoint and who are some of their top global customers? Below is a brief summary on the customers and industries using the Liferay and SharePoint platforms.

Liferay – who is using it?

Liferay is the leading Open Source portal server.  Many enterprises are using Liferay to build robust business solutions that deliver long-term value and results.  The company has seen a recent rapid growth in the past few years.  Liferay is an all-in-one enterprise portal with broad product capabilities that provide a user-friendly interface where you can centralize, share and collaborate.

Liferay has proven its real world performance globally with many clients across many diverse industries and business functions. It has been used in just about every industry around the world including automotive, education, government, healthcare, financial services, IT and Hi-Tech, media and entertainment and more.  It is primarily used for corporate websites, intranets and extranets but is highly scalable and easy to launch with many out of the box features.  Major organizations around the world choose Liferay for a wide variety of business functions beyond the traditional portal:

–  Intranet portals
–  Extranet portals
–  Content and Document Management
–  Web publishing and shared workspaces
–  Enterprise collaboration
–  Social networking
–  Enterprise portals and identify management

Liferay is growing year over year, and has over 150,000 community members, 5 million downloads, over 500 apps in Liferay Marketplace, and 650 employees.

Some of Liferay’s key customers include:

Learn more about their case studies and the enterprises using Liferay across industries and around the world.

SharePoint – who is using it?

SharePoint’s usage is widespread because of its complex collaboration structure. The platform allows you to develop your business collaboration solutions fast and effectively.  Similar to Liferay, SharePoint’s customers are spread globally across just about every industry including retail, education, transportation and more.

According to Microsoft, SharePoint is adding approximately 20,000 SharePoint users every day.  That is approximately 7.3 million new SharePoint users every year. Similar to Liferay, the majority of customers use SharePoint as an internal tool; intranet/extranets and enterprise content and document management.

Here are the 5 most common uses of SharePoint:

  • Intranet portals
  • Extranet portals
  • Enterprise content and document management
  • Public facing websites
  • Forms & workflow

Some of Sharepoint’s key customers include:

Check out some of SharePoint’s case studies here.

Which portal you choose depends entirely on your industry, and what tasks and objectives you are looking to accomplish.  In a previous article, we took a look at some Alternatives to SharePoint.

Question:  What portal technology are you using for your business?  Are you satisfied with it? If not, what frustrates you about your portal technology?  Share your experiences below. 

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