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Lead Software Professional at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Administration functions are available from the control panel.

What is most valuable?

  • Support OSGi Framework
  • Excellent Content management system
  • Administrative functions through the control panel
  • Elastic search

These features are valuable because they all are basic requirements for all portals and have been achieved easily with the Liferay DXP portal.

You

How has it helped my organization?

Very important changes are OSGi modularization for existing portlets and new modules. It change the way of development and make life easy for developers

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been playing liferay from last 9 years and palyed almost all the version and have seen many pros and cons across versions.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Yes we faced many issues during production deployment and specially performance tuning and best suppoprt architecture.

Buyer's Guide
Liferay Digital Experience Platform
October 2024
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Yes as this is open source so don't see its big hurdle here.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

10/10

Technical Support:

Technical support is very nice for the EE customers.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I did not previously use a different solution.

How was the initial setup?

If its first time then you will definatly struggle but later on it would be very easy if you understand the structure.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It should maintain a competitive price in the open source market.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

What other advice do I have?

It is just awesome; you should experience DXP. I am blogging many useful solution on www.liferaysolution.com

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: My company is a Liferay platinum partner.
PeerSpot user
it_user535350 - PeerSpot reviewer
LifeRay Functional Lead at a wellness & fitness company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
You can create your own secure service bus for information. We always have issues with Social Office.

What is most valuable?

The features I find valuable are its integration points with other systems and scalability. This is important because the portal (Liferay) is an addition to the current J2EE Framework. That being said, it lends itself to roll all processing (Spring batch) into the Liferay Tomcat bundle. This process can be done in reverse order to ensure performance.

For integration points using simple plugins with SAP, you can create your own secure service bus for information. If you would like to convert your Liferay platform to a presentation layer for CRM, you can leverage Dynamic MS CRM or SugarCRM with ease using plugins or a Java framework.

How has it helped my organization?

Our organization benefited by the automated client setup and an easy CMS setup.

What needs improvement?

Major upgrades switch the Liferay framework core structure dramatically in EVERY occasion. However, there were only subtle changes from the last minor upgrade to the major upgrade.

For how long have I used the solution?

I used this product for two years where I currently work. In my former job, I used it for six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have encountered stability issues during the upgrade process from 5.2 EE to 6.1.XX EE. There are always issues with Social Office.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We had no scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support need was moderate as the tool lends itself to be customized away from the (out-of-the box) OOB portal product. Liferay does not always support these custom components.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used ColdFusion for a previous project for a CMS portal.

How was the initial setup?

The installation was simple on a Linux-based operating system. It was complex with Windows Servers, but we still managed.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We recommend never leveraging static components when developing licensing requirements because the operating system layer and its environment will always change to fit support costs.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not evaluate alternative solutions.

What other advice do I have?

Make sure you understand what you want the product to do. If your company has an overall future for growth, then Liferay is a good choice as it is an enterprise solution.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Buyer's Guide
Liferay Digital Experience Platform
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about Liferay Digital Experience Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.
IT Consultant at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Open source portal platform for multiple user access, but the integration and configuration need to be simplified
Pros and Cons
  • "We chose Liferay because it is open-source and that we can make any number of users apply, register into the system and use the system, as opposed to other solutions where the cost is based on user licenses. This is one of the most attractive features."
  • "The integration and configuration need to be simplified."

What is our primary use case?

We have two primary use cases for this solution between two installations. One is being used as a national business portal, and the other is used as an archival and preservation system.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are the content manager, where you can configure events, the archival and preservation feature, and the workflow feature where before the document is scanned and awaiting approval to be archived, the chief archivist can provide an opinion of whether the content is of preservation value or archival value. He puts a comment in the workflow.

We chose Liferay because it is open-source and that we can make any number of users apply, register into the system and use the system, as opposed to other solutions where the cost is based on user licenses.  This is one of the most attractive features.

What needs improvement?

The integration area needs to be improved. It needs to be more user-friendly.

The integration and configuration need to be simplified. If for example, I had to configure the application to a payment module, especially in the business licensing system, it would be better if we could have a feature that would require less code to enable easy integration with other systems.

The end-user requires training, some knowledge transfer is needed. It has been proven to be a challenge, because we don't have any in Tanzania, and we don't have a data center for Liferay.

In the next release, the integration capabilities need to be easier to use by someone who is not as technical. Also, when it comes to troubleshooting, the logs need to be published on a page that's easier to use rather than going to a folder somewhere.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution since 2016.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We are using Enterprise Edition 6 and I know that it is not the latest edition available, but so far, this edition of this solution is stable. We have not experienced any issues. Later, with an increased number of users, there may be some issues. We don't know, but for now, it's good.

Anyone in Tanzania who wants to register for a business license has to log into the system. There are many users. Just to give you some statistics 30,000 people have applied for business licenses and 8,000 have been issued. The remainder 20,000+ are waiting for their applications that are still in the workflow.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The reason Liferay Digital Experience was chosen over other products was the fact that we did not have to pay for user licenses. Liferay supported an infinite number of users.

The business case for the application was the business community in Tanzania to be able to register in the portal and apply for a business license. So however much the users of the system grow we are confident Liferay shall handle the load without any issues

So in terms of scalability, my answer is that Liferay is okay.

In terms of hardware we have multiple servers. The setup we had was for purposes of having improved responsiveness and availability.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have not received support from Liferay because we have done everything through the integrator. We would prefer to have our people trained than getting support from Liferay itself.

This is something we are working on at the SLA level.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

As a national business portal, it is used as a content management solution and we have not used any other solution. For the archival and preservation system, we used an application called Saperion Enterprise Content Management System. 

When compared to Saperion Enterprise Content Management System it can support more users without having an impact on the cost. That was favorable for us because we need any researcher anywhere in the world to be able to access the Tanzania  National Archive without having any cost on the software. We chose Liferay mainly because of that.

How was the initial setup?

Based on the document specifications, it was time-consuming because of the nature of the deployment. 

Before even looking at Liferay, the system requirements took six months because we use different stakeholders from different government institutions and other stakeholders from the private sector. 

The configuration of Liferay took six weeks.

Another task that took a lot of time was deployment because once it was set up, different people had to start testing the application. This took a lot of time because all of the different stakeholders had to be given time to test it. 

Overall, it took a year, with ten staff to deploy and maintain.

We haven't had any issues with our deployment of Liferay.

What about the implementation team?

We used Melink to help with the implementation. The experience with them was fair.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's an open-source structure.

The licensing cost was a one-off. Other costs are for professional services to integrate Liferay to other existing systems. Those are the main costs and also costs related to deployment, setting up the load balancing, and later on having to configure the disaster recovery site. These are all related costs to the deployment of Liferay in different scenarios.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We knew of applications like Drupal, but we did some research through Google. We settled on Liferay because of it's open-source functionality and our end-user was keen on getting an open-source platform. It was exactly what Liferay offered.

We didn't have extensive comparison tests with other platforms or applications.

What other advice do I have?

With any application, the number one thing is to get the requirements-gathering stage done well, to identify your requirements to do your analysis properly.

The requirements gathering needs to be very thorough and all-inclusive. All stakeholders need to be involved.

Get a good company for the implementation.

You must have the proper hardware sizing.

I would recommend Liferay for any company that is looking at deploying an enterprise-wide content management system. I would recommend Liferay any day, anytime.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user536244 - PeerSpot reviewer
Liferay Solution Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
Provides content aggregation and personalization. Only the simple, straightforward cases are documented.

What is most valuable?

Aggregation and personalization (think dashboards) are the really unique selling points of a portal. If you don't need those, you don't need a portal and there will be other libraries or frameworks that are better suited to solve your problem.

How has it helped my organization?

We are not really using it ourselves.

What needs improvement?

The easy, straightforward cases are usually the only ones that are documented. Once you need to do something a little more advanced, you usually won't find any examples and will have to resort to looking through the code to find a place where they do something similar and figure out how it works by stepping through that in a debugger.

They also really like to create new libraries to do stuff (AlloyUI, Metal.js, Senna.js, etc.) instead of seeing what is already available and trying to adapt that for portal use (and possibly committing that back). And lastly, we've run in to a lot of bugs that tend to come back in every version. Things get fixed in one version and after upgrading you run into the same bug again.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have about 8 years of experience with the product. I've worked with late 5.x versions up until the 7/DXP version now. I'm also a Liferay Highlighted blogger (https://web.liferay.com/web/fimez/blog) and I presented at Liferay Devcon last year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We didn't encounter any real stability issues, only regressions and bugs.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We didn't encounter any real scalability issues, only regressions and bugs.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is better than most.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used Sun Java System Portal Server. We switched because Sun Portal just plain sucked.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup is as easy as downloading, unpacking and starting. No hassle.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Always use the Enterprise Edition, as it isn't worth your own time to try and hunt down bugs in the Community Edition, and there are lots of bugs/regressions.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at JBoss Portal and Pluto.

What other advice do I have?

Only use it when you really need a portal and don't use it as an application framework. In that case, it only complicates your development and performance needlessly.

We tried the 'eat your own dog food' approach and used Liferay for our company's website, but Liferay just isn't meant to build websites. It wasn't easy/simple enough for normal web content editors to add or change content. It is also hard for our designers to create cutting edge designs that can be easily integrated into Liferay as a theme.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Official partner
PeerSpot user
it_user517965 - PeerSpot reviewer
Liferay Portals Technical Lead at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
We can extend its functionality and customize it to meet our customers' requirements.

What is most valuable?

All the features that are provided by Liferay are very useful, such as Web Content, Document Library and Media, Roles, Permissioning, Resources, Organizations, Users, Sites, Custom Fields, Plugins, and so on. These features enable us to extend Liferay functionality and allow us to customize the out-of-the-box features of Portal to meet our customers’ requirements.

How has it helped my organization?

We are using it for projects to provide quick turnaround for our clients' requests. Liferay has a powerful feature for the hot deployment of plugins, and service builders for easily creating tables using Sprint, Hibernate, JPA, etc.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see them arrange more symposiums in India, because most of the resources who work on Liferay are from India, more than any other country.

I'd like for them to have more interactive sessions, training or face-to-face meetings with the Liferay core team for Developers, so that we can have our questions/clarifications clarified directly with them, rather than asking over a webinar session, through forums, through support tickets, etc.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Liferay for the past 10+ years now and I love to work with it.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have not encountered any serious stability issues, but if we come across anything, we get great support from Liferay as a patch.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The portal is very easy in terms of adding more nodes to a cluster.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is 9/10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have used two other portal servers. I really did not like the way they allowed admins to do administrative actions. Liferay is easy to understand and complete the admin actions through the control panel with meaningful names and a short description about what each module does.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup is straightforward and I did not find it difficult. Liferay has great online documentation, which gives us more confidence in achieving anything with it.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is a budget-friendly solution and less expensive than any other portal servers available on the market.

What other advice do I have?

Go with this product, because there is great support from the company, rich forum support and online documentation, and the source code allows you to make changes on your own with an LGPL license from vendor.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user517965 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user517965Liferay Portals Technical Lead at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User

We have support with vendor and we create tickets and their agents will get in touch with us through call or through ticket. Thanks.

Best regards,
Srik

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Communications head at a university with 51-200 employees
Real User
An open-source enterprise portal that's easy-to-use
Pros and Cons
  • "The look and feel and the user interface are great."
  • "The plugins should be more affordable."

What is most valuable?

We like Likeray because it's a secure platform.

The look and feel and the user interface are great.

What needs improvement?

PHP offers more plugins than Liferay. The plugins should be more affordable.

Liferay needs to offer more in terms of updates and development. WordPress is constantly offering new updates and new features; I hardly see that with Liferay — although, it could be because we don't have an enterprise license.

Also, an e-commerce plugin tool would be a nice feature. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Liferay for at least three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Compared to WordPress, I hardly experience any issues or bugs.

How was the initial setup?

For us, the initial setup was very complex — It's in Java. In Malaysia, there are not a lot of Java writers or developers.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Licensing costs can be very expensive.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend Liferay to another company, but the price cannot be overlooked. Maintaining a license can be a hefty investment.

Due to the licensing and plugin costs, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user538218 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Liferay Portal/Web Developer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
With the roles and permissions management, developers have the ability to build persona- and preference-based functionality​.

What is most valuable?

  • CMS lets business users to create and manage web content by business users, while maintaining revisions. Liferay enables users to be independent of developers and to be able to manage content within the portal.
  • Roles and permissions management gives developers the ability to build persona- and preference-based functionality within the portal.
  • Document library
  • Plugins, workflows and rules provide flexibility to customize the portal.

How has it helped my organization?

  • A self-service portal for customers
  • An online community to share and get knowledge
  • A portal for distributing manuals.

What needs improvement?

  • Ability to create content
  • A cloud offering

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Liferay for approximately five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Liferay is a very stable product (except for version 7, as it is relatively new).

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have no issues with scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We started using Liferay directly. There was no previous solution.

How was the initial setup?

Setup was straightforward.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is very affordable and licensing is similar to Red Hat Linux, where we pay only for the support.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Adobe Experience Manager and WebSphere Portal v6.

What other advice do I have?

Have a complete understanding of out-of-the-box features as Liferay makes most of the functionality required available without any customization.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Managing Director with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Solution for project implementations including documentation management.

What is most valuable?

Liferay is a good product and can reduce time and cost on project implementation. Liferay opens the door for most problems of our customers. If you have digital problems in your organizations, Liferay already solves more than 80% of them.

How has it helped my organization?

Most of my Liferay experience is working on projects to solve other organizations’ problems and meet their requirements. With one of our projects, I used Liferay as a document management solution. With Liferay, users are happy with its ability to manage digital documents.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see an improvement on the Ecommerce platform.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used this solution for over five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have experience on enterprise and community versions with HA implementations for less than five servers. So far, I did not face any scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used Microsoft SharePoint and IBM WebSphere. They are not straightforward and have a complex user experience as a developer.

How was the initial setup?

The setup is straightforward.

What was our ROI?

The solution has a good ROI.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution is inexpensive.

What other advice do I have?

I suggest getting this product. It is easy to use and has a big impact to reduce implementation time. It is not just a product solution. It also has excellent features as a development platform.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: I am a solution provider and support Liferay products to our customers.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Liferay Digital Experience Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: October 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Liferay Digital Experience Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.