Liferay East Coast Symposium 2011

 

Our Liferay East Coast Symposium was held last week outside Washington D.C., doubling the size of last year's ECS.  The event was designed to support community members, prospective Liferay customers and existing Liferay EE administrators / developers / business managers.  With such a diverse audience, several new activities were added to ECS to expand the benefits to attendees:

  • New: Industry showcases
    • A solutions showcase area was setup for 6 different industries using Liferay.
  • New: Call for Papers from the community
    • Community members worldwide were invited to present on the future of Liferay.
  • New: Official Liferay Training was available the day before the event
    • Over 60 attendees took either the Portal Administration or the new Themes Development course. 
  • New: Application partner sponsors
    • Partners with solutions built on Liferay were also invited to attend.
      • Mule showed the new TCat Server bundle with Liferay as well as Mule ESB.
      • Terrecotta showed their integration with Ehcache.
      • Roambi showed their iPad/iPhone reporting application.
      • Several industry vertical partners also demonstrated within the showcases.

 

The agenda for ECS was designed to support three themes which were: Liferay as a strategic developer platform, the community announcement of the Liferay Marketplace, and the development of social applications using Liferay as a web platform.    The opening keynote worked to define how these three themes were interconnected and Liferay's roadmap to support them.  As a platform, Liferay is being used worldwide for a wide array of web projects, benefiting from it's richness, integratability, and ease of use.  Enterprises are now looking at Liferay as a key strategic web platform for multiple projects throughout their infrastructure.  The new Liferay Marketplace, will extend the capabilities of a Liferay eco-system, simplifying how deploymenters find and install additional "modular applications" as well as how third party developers will advertise and monetize their Liferay-based applications.  Social application development is a new development methodology, where any web application can be extended to allow the application to leverage a user's "social identity", enabling individuals within a team to leverage "social data" or "social features".   James Falkner had a simple video produced, showing how the Marketplace will look and how it will simplify finding and installing modular applications.

  

 

The event was also designed to allow individuals to learn about products, services, partners, to interact with technical and business leaders, and to impact the future of the Liferay community.  Enabling the Liferay community to participate more is a key theme for 2011 and this event was the first to solicit community leaders to propose and give sessions.   

Liferay also announced the following within the Special Events section: 

  • LIVE is now expanding to support weekly sessions hosted by both Liferay and community members.
    • See: http://www.liferay.com/events/web-events
  • New docs are available including the Updated Buyers Guide.
    • See: http://www.liferay.com/documentation/additional-resources/whitepapers
  • Facebook and Twitter (and other social media) will be integrated with Liferay Events and Liferay Community sites to better enable users within the community to collaborate across sites.
  • Liferay also announced a new offer for an iPad 2 to Liferay Training attendees:
    • See: http://www.liferay.com/training/ipadoffer

Thank you everyone for participating in the Liferay ECS, be sure to watch for other upcoming Symposiums and Events at http://www.liferay.com/events/liferay-symposiums.  Coming soon:


Liferay Hungary Symposium: 26 May 2011
Liferay France Symposium: 15 June 2011

 

 

 

0