Liferay Developer Services

About a year ago, Liferay introduced a new program that I have been actively participating in, Liferay Developer Services. But what is this program?

Liferay Support

When you are a Liferay DXP customer, you automatically get access to Liferay Support as part of the Subscription Services. Support is staffed by a great bunch of people that want to help clients resolve product-level issues. Problems with installation, configuration, as well as helping clients report and resolve product-level defects are all areas which the team excels. In their role as primary support contact, they are often asked to go beyond their mandate and will help finding relevant documentation and even some light training when necessary to explain Liferay features and how to use them.

The one area that they get a lot of requests on, but an area that they cannot help with, is customization. It just wouldn't be possible or effective for Support to try and field questions about customization or development, there's just no way to constrain scope of what they might cover and it would be a struggle to keep up with their responsibilities.

So when a client submits a question that is based upon customization, Support must reject the request. Support will, of course, offer alternatives that clients might pursue, but they cannot directly help with the request.

Liferay Global Services

One option that is always shared is to engage with Liferay Global Services, Liferay's consulting arm, to assist with customization issues. Global Services offers a variety of different options, from short term engagements to help with performance or upgrades to full-scale engagements to build complete solutions. Global Services of course specialize in Liferay-based solutions, so all of the Global Services consultants will have direct knowledge and experience with all Liferay products, and they bring that experience into every engagement.

Global Services can be a great choice when you need to get a project done but are short on experienced resources that can help make it happen.

Liferay Developer Services

A gap in offerings between Liferay Support and Liferay Global Services was identified. There can be times where a client might have an existing development team which is capable of implementing solutions, they sometimes can hit situations for which they need some assistance.

In these cases, Liferay Support cannot help with customization concerns. Liferay Global Services is an option here, but GS engagements must be staffed and scheduled, and this may not align with immediate needs.

This identified a gap in Liferay's offerings - clients needed a Support-like offering for customization concerns that did not require a complete consulting engagement.

Enter Liferay Developer Services. The Developer Services program is an enhancement to a client's existing Subscription Services and provides the following:

  • Customization-based tickets through help.liferay.com (the Liferay Support gateway).
  • Access to exclusive documentation and knowledge base.
  • Access to exclusive code examples.
  • Access to experienced Global Services team members that bring their experience to answering questions, and indirectly access to other Liferay engineers to bring the full knowledge and experience of Liferay to address the customization concerns.
  • Answers for soft developer concerns such as "What is the best way to do X in Liferay?" or "how can I integrate Y?", etc.

The Liferay Developer Services program will make available developer resources to assist your existing development teams to complete their customization tasks without booking and scheduling a full consulting engagement.

That's what Developer Services is, but what is it not? Well, Developer Services will not deliver a complete solution. They will not be an addition to your development team; DS can offer help to a team struggling to get a customization done, but it will still be up to the team to do the work and complete the customization. DS will not sit in on your Scrum calls, etc. Developer Services is a resource to help you complete your customization tasks, but they won't do them for you. For that kind of access, Global Services will be a better option.

So...

Sounds good, right?

For more information, check out Liferay's official page for Developer Services.

To sign up, contact your Liferay Sales representative.

And, if you have any questions about the program, feel free to comment here or post a query to Liferay's Community Slack and I'll be happy to answer them all!