Bryan H Cheung
In one of our company-wide meetings last year, I talked about how Liferay was born in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble bursting, and then pivoted to a subscription-driven business in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. I mused about what 2020 might have in store, but I admit I would have never imagined this. As we respond to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic,...
Background Last fall we reintroduced the option to use clustering in Liferay 7.0 by compiling a series of modules manually and including them in your project. We received a lot of feedback that this was a very cumbersome process and didn’t really provide the benefits we intended in bringing back clustering. Enable Clustering Beginning with Liferay Portal 7.1 CE...
Background When we removed clustering from the GA release of LP7, we were trying to solve a specific problem. However, I knew even as I made the decision that this would frustrate smaller systems integrators in places like Southern and Eastern Europe, India, and Southeast Asia that work on small projects with implementation budgets of $30,000 or less and a fraction of that for each...
Hello Liferay Community! I'm here at the Liferay Unconference in Amsterdam, listening to Brett Swaim talk about his real world experiences with upgrades and Staging. Earlier, I ran into Darryl from Paris to catch up on his dancing career, and last night I got to see Corne for the first time in two years, which seems far too long! Over the last 24 hours, Liferay people...
Today I’m writing to announce several new and exciting initiatives within the Liferay Community. We consider this to be the starting point for a completely revamped community experience. We also have other changes in the works and can’t wait to share the details of what we have been working on. Read on for more details and let us know what you think. ...
Today I’m writing to announce that we are discontinuing support for Liferay Connected Services and Audience Targeting for Liferay Portal 7 Community. The main factor behind the decision was the lack of community adoption for both offerings. Regarding Audience Targeting, there was low adoption by community members compared with most other...
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...
Today I’d like to let you know that Liferay Portal 7 Community does not have "out of the box" support for clustering, non-open source app servers (Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere), and non-open source databases (Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase DB). Support for these non-open source systems will be found in Liferay's current and future commercial releases, which...
The latest Magic Quadrant report from Gartner on the Horizontal Portal market has just been released, and you can find it here on our website. I just read it through and here’s what I noticed. A Market Transformed First, the report opens with a strong statement on how much the portal market has changed: “The past five years has witnessed a massive transformation of...
If you haven’t heard the news yet, Liferay has been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals for the fifth year in a row, and we’ve placed second only to IBM—and well ahead of SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. We’re really excited about our placement in this year’s report, and so are our partners and customers. At our annual user conference, many people shared that...
Paul Hinz forwarded us an old whitepaper and presentation from IBM back in 2009 that sought to debunk the "myth of free open source portals." The main idea was that open source portals might save you money on licensing but the savings would be outweighed by extra costs in development, upgrades and maintenance. Just for fun I did a little research to see whether Liferay...
June 15th was our first-ever Liferay France Symposium held in Paris. We had a healthy turnout of over 100 community members, customers, and partners, who came together to learn about what's new in Liferay 6.1, hear customer case studies, and get connected with each other. Juan Fernandez presents en français at the Liferay France Symposium 2011. We...
I am happy to announce that Liferay.com is now running on Liferay Portal 6 EE. The re-fresh is a minor one with respect to content but a major infrastructural upgrade that will pave the way for future enhancements to the site, including leveraging workflow for our web publishing and community interaction, and the introduction of social equity for our community...
I just got back from our first Liferay Roadshow in Amsterdam yesterday and gave a talk about how identity and interactions are changing due to paradigm shifts in technology and corporate culture. I'll post about that some other time, but I did talk to someone considering Liferay for a business application and they asked the inevitable "what's the future of Java?" question. I...
"Rather than boring your customers to death, there is a clear opportunity to put the dull corporate website to rest. Then resurrect it as a platform for true community engagement that functions as a hub for interaction with all customers and stakeholders." Sounds good in theory, but how does it work in practice? But first, let's consider how we got here in the first place. It's...
Liferay had the chance to be a platinum sponsor at the Open Source Conference 2010, organized by Red Hat and Accenture. At almost 450 attendees, it was the Benelux region's largest-ever OSS focused conference. When I asked for a show of hands, most folks in the audience said they felt more comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt, so I'm assuming that we had a strong showing of...
As some of you may know, Liferay decided earlier this year to make a strategic investment in growing the European market. To that end, Joseph Shum, our former Alliance Manager for North America, and myself have been traveling frequently to our offices in Frankfurt over the last six months. Liferay's first Italy Symposium. The venue was an old church converted into a...
It's been an incredibly busy first half of 2010 and I haven't had as much time to blog as I'd like to. With new offices in Budapest and Brazil, rapid sales growth and rapid product releases, there's always too much to do and not enough time to communicate! When you're always in the midst of all things Liferay you don't realize that the perception from the outside is not always...
I would like to announce that starting with version 6, Liferay Portal will be made available under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) v2.1. The short history of commercial open source software vendors is littered with examples of vendors promising why these license changes made time-to-time are of benefit to the so-called “community” whereas the real motive is often to...
According to the H, Oracle has quietly discontinued OpenSSO Express, the community version of OpenSSO previously made available by Sun. It'd be sensationalistic to make any wide-sweeping generalizations about Oracle's approach to open source from a single incident, but one thing clearly illustrated is that open source software uniquely mitigates risks for its users. Had OpenSSO been...
Hello to everyone in the Liferay community and a belated Happy New Year. I trust January has been filled with new opportunities and renewed energy for all of us after the holiday break. I've gotten in the habit of writing an annual year-in-review entry but am a little behind on 2009. So many good things are happening here at Liferay that it's hard to keep up! We recently put...
Robert Schware from the Global Learning Portal recently shared with us about a study tour of three different educational organizations to see how the Madrid School System's portal software has made an impact on their educational community and what organizations can do to embrace more open source. Here's a quick summary: "In partnership with USAID and AMIDEAST, the Global...
Another great example of the innovation that the Liferay community keeps contributing is the recently released Liferay Linked Data Module from IMC Technologies. Linked Data is an approach that lets you both publish and access data in a way that is semantically specified according to standard models, interoperable, cross-referenceable and remotely queryable. This...
The folks at Integrated Semantics have developed a Flex/AIR-based front-end for Liferay Portal. This is a great example of Liferay's flexibility when it comes to separating the presentation tier from the back-end services, standards implementations, APIs, and authentication / authorization capabilities. Gartner's portal decomposition ideas are at play here (portal server providing...
This is very late in coming, but I wanted to do a recap of our latest round of Symposiums that took place in September and October of 2009. Three events took place around the globe in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, and Bangalore in a span of just two weeks, with hundreds in attendance at each event. This was a landmark conference series for Liferay and we are very proud of our teams...
We had a phenomenal turn out for this year's Liferay West Coast Symposium, our annual community and customer conference. Our North America marketing and events team, led by Cecilia Lam, put together a fantastic event filled with valuable business and technical insights, including performance tuning information, business case studies, customization training, and opportunities to meet...
I want to take a moment to announce that we are going to start referring to the open source builds of Liferay Portal as "Community Edition." We originally introduced Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition at the beginning of this year to provide a new subscription offering to organizations that wanted the benefits of open source software but wanted continued service packs on older...
I am pleased to announce that the second beta for Liferay Social Office is now available for download. This product is the result of a close collaboration between Liferay's product and engineering teams and our awesome community. What's unique about Social Office is that we had the chance to speak with folks on the business side who were more concerned about ease of use and...
The New York Times had an article this week about Goodwill Industries, the $2.6 billion dollar non-profit organization that generates revenue through retail sales of donated goods and clothing. In part due to the economic downturn and also because of Goodwill's new marketing and diversification efforts, more middle class customers are going to Goodwill to look not...
Everyone these days is thinking about the economy and how to hold on to their cash in what seems to be the worst downturn of the last 60 years. Open source vendors that had for the last 24 months been emphasizing other OSS benefits like control, risk-mitigation, better fit to business, and standards, seem to have made a strong return to value-oriented messaging. We've done our...
When Brian Chan first started working on Liferay in 2000, one of the immediate goals was to use Liferay to build a public website for his church. Of course, as a portal-based website, it would have additional personalization capabilities, and one need was to allow individual users to keep a daily record of what they've done, much like what we now know as blogs. Hence, the web...
I had a chance to reflect on 2008 on my way to Tokyo two weeks ago and was really humbled by realizing how many amazing opportunities Liferay has had this year. 2008 Highlights: Continued Grassroots Success, and Recognition from Decision Makers and Marquee Customers 2008 has been the year where Liferay's traditional strength within the developer and SI community has...
This week I'm pleased to announce the first beta release of Liferay Social Office, Liferay's new social collaboration software. While Liferay Portal has had social networking, web 2.0, and collaboration functionality for some time, Social Office is our first effort at putting it all together in a intuitive and integrated way. Social Office has an elegant new interface...
Some of you may have been following our developments with the analyst community, particularly Gartner and their 2008 Magic Quadrant reports. For those of that haven't, Liferay was recently recognized in two Magic Quadrants: "Horizontal Portal Products," where Liferay was named a Visionary for its Liferay Portal product "Social Software," which covered Liferay Collaboration...
Brian just wrote a great blog about the Meetup and I couldn't resist adding my usual philosophical shpiel. The Meetup this year was interesting because of how much it was a reflection of the social collaborative dynamic of companies and communities like Liferay. Liferay is a geographically distributed, heterogenous (employees, customers and community enthusiasts) group of people...
I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune while boarding my flight for Rome where I'm helping a client launch their new social computing platform this month. I had heard about the devastation in Myanmar that happened now over two weeks ago, but it wasn't until Wednesday morning of this week that what happened really hit me. A photo on the front page of the Tribune showed...
Liferay enjoyed a great JavaOne this year, our third corporate appearance at the ground zero of the Java development world. The emphasis this year was on openness, community, and the individual, reflecting the transformation our industry and culture have gone through over the last decade. In IT, that's been reflected in a shift from proprietary solutions controlled by the few to...
We've wrapped up the second day of the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration conference here in Baltimore, where open source software was highlighted as one of the five "disruptive" forces in the technology market. Social computing topics dominated the conference, which makes sense because portals, content management and collaboration software really do converge in...
I'm currently at the Web2ForDev conference in Rome, Italy, sponsored by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and many other organizations, including the International Fund for Agriculture Development, one of our clients. It's great to see how the development (as in developing countries, not software development) is using technology to empower the poor to help themselves. ...