Blogs

Hello, welcome to the Liferay North America Symposium Live Blog. If you've never followed one of these live blogs before, the content runs in reverse chronological order so that people following live can just refresh the page and see the latest on top.

Also, there's a significant amount of quality technical content at Symposium but I don't think I can do justice if I tried to cover them. If that's something you'd like to see next year, let us know! Thanks! - Jason

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7:00PM and beyond - The Not Live Summary Done the Morning After At some point after the last session, which was a full 12 hours after I started the day, I had reached total and complete blogging burnout. So I have zero pictures of the evening's festivities.

Dinner/Networking Reception. The squash hummus was amazing.  I'm constantly amazed by how great the Liferay community is. Had a great time with some of our customers that I met earlier that morning (Shout out to the gals at Sammons Financial! Thanks for coming to Symposium and for being great company to hang out with.).

Check out Day 2's Live Blog, too! Thanks for reading. 

6:20PM - Mr. Shackelford

Developing for Email

• Lack of standards
• 36 graphical email clients
• A bunch of desktop clients
• Google mail is a gross violated of styles

• emailonacid.com
• litmus.com
• inliner.cm (campaignmonitor.com)
• zurb.com/ink (might be Outlook specific)

6:02PM - Making Liferay.com a Responsive Site | Luke Shackleford

Best practices around web dev for mobile. Create a triangle of collaboration: Developers talk to marketers who talk to the designers who are talking to the developers. It's like a recycle symbol.

Advice for Content Writers:

• Write for mobile first, because three paragraphs of desktop content is ridiculously long on mobile.
• Say it with fewer words.
• Imagine it on a mobile device
• Remove redundancy
• Consider splitting content into multiple pages
• Eliminate content that isn’t suited for your audience

• Ask Design Questions about UX. If there aren’t clear guidelines, ask and collaborate.
• Test all the browsers that are applicable (see next bullet).
• Talk to web analytics people to find out what your audience requirements are (is your audience using IE8?).
• Create templates that are naturally responsive.

• Push your developers forward in their abilities.
• Design for mobile, do things that wrap/vanish/toggle. Consider the flow & interaction of your design.
• Be a standard kind of fancy. If you do something clever as a designer, work with your developer to standardize its development and repurpose/reuse those standards. 

4:50PM - Camarda and Hietala Dr. Camarda and Janne Hietala are working on the digital transformation of learning with The Epic Challenge Collaboratory. Valamis is publishing a whitepaper on digital transformation of learning in the next week or so. Looking forward to that. 

4:45PM - Camarda and Hietala Well this is pretty special. Dr. Camarda is an NASA astronaut. He just shared about how he and another NASA engineer started a garage workshop (literally in his friend's garage) to develop a solution that he later was able to implement and use on a shuttle mission. How cool is that?

4:41PM - Dr. Charles Camarda (NASA) and Janne Hietala (Arcusys) "We need another Apollo Effect". During the Apollo era, grad rates more than doubled. S.T.E.M. graduations increased. It was a competitive model then with the space race against the Soviets. "We need a new Apollo Effect. We need to have a Martian effect."

4:28PM - Tweets Check out the Twitter feed for #LRNAS2015!

3:20PM - Brian Kim Liferay built a bulk API call to SFDC and pulls a huge amount of data to Liferay. Doesn’t use up our regular SFDC API calls. 10M fields every 30 minutes (adjustable). We can surface this data anyway we want into our engagement platform. 

3:10PM - Brian Kim Customer Experience is not just about acquisition of new customers but also the retention of existing customers. 

Acquisition Buyer's Journey is:

Awareness > Education > Evaluation > Justification > Purchase

Brian's proposing a Retention Customer Journey:

Onboarding > Support > Experience

As a marketer, I don't deal much with the Retention side of things, but this is really ineresting. Would love to explore this more. 

3:08PM - Connected Customer Engagement Platform | Brian Kim, Liferay COO

2:53PM - Liferay Skynet? I asked James about sentient Liferay. He just looked at me, got on the down escalator, and gave me a thumbs up as he disappeared to the floor below. Strange. (T2 joke, guys. You got it right? It's been a long day.)

2:51PM - Wait a minute The implications of Liferay replying to a text message in an intelligent and autonomous way just settled in. Liferay's gone sentient. Not sure if this is a good thing. Let me go chase down James and ask. I'll be back.

2:47PM - James Falkner Whoa. Rad real life demo. James just used Siri on his iPhone to sms text a Liferay server and asked for several files about a specific company. Liferay texted back that the files were emailed to him and also found that one of our sales guys knows a lot about that company. Liferay, in a text, offered to set up a meeting with the sales guy. So he texts back, "yes", and a calendar invite was sent to the sales guy from James's calendar. Pretty cool stuff. 

2:45PM - James Falkner Responsive Content - Makes web content look great on mobile. But doesn't pay any attention to context. So it can make bad content look good.

Adaptive Content - Contextual content awareness that avoides creating bad content combos (e.g. a twitter feed with a negative comment + a "write a review" call-to-action.)

2:29PM - James Falkner Omnichannel engagement is not about marketing. It's about creating better experiences for your customers. Ouch (I'm a marketer). 

2:29PM - James Falkner Three really important things you have to get right to build a good customer expreience:

1. Unified User Profiles - Regardless of what channel a customer is engaging, you need to have a unified user profile across all those channels.
2. Channel Interactions Streams - All those channels need a way to talk to and get info from your platform (Liferay). 
3. Adaptive content - Smart content via all channels. Adapted to their inferred preferences and actual preferences as well as the channel. 

2:26PM - Liferay as a Platform for Omnichannel Engagement | James Falkner

Liferay is evolving because the portal market is evolving. The feature set is growing in order for Liferay to become a true User Experiene Platform. I, however, am devolving as a photographer. 

2:07PM - Take the Water Walk There's a booth set up at Symposium with a lighted path and two 40lb (18kg) jugs of water. If you carry the jugs to the end of the lighted path and back, Liferay will donate $30 to charity:water to build wells in developing nations. Why the 40lb jugs? Every day, in many corners of the world, children have to carry that much water every day over long distances. charity:water seeks to provide clean drinking water to these communities. I did it four times. Bam. $120 donated! My back hurts and I think I pulled a muscle in my calf but I had set the record for most trips. For about 3 minutes. I heard someone just did 10 trips with the 80lbs of water. $300 donated. Right on!

11:47AM - Liferay Pulse Awards!

11:32AM - HP Keynote Great job Anne! Really enjoyed that presentation. 

11:25AM - HP Keynote Results? Of the 650K users: 92% visit multiple times a week. 84% of users visit multiple times a day (50% increase from the legacy tools). Session time decreased by 30%, but they increased the amount of content they consumed by 30%. No more haystacks of needles. 

But did they enable their partners to sell more efficiently? Yes. Partners who use the portal have an 82% win rate compared to 33% if they don't. The partners that use the portal also have 17x bigger deals. Holy cow. That's fantastic.

11:21AM - HP Keynote New HP partner portal now serves 650K users. It's a single global entry point for partners to get product info, marketing programs, deal and opportunity management, quoting, comp, and 170+ other services. 

If the site is down HP loses $300K a minute.

11:19AM - HP Keynote Liferay to the rescue! Why Liferay? If you need to make a big change in a big company, it’s all about how fast you can go. SPEED.

11:13AM - HP Keynote Happy partners are more likley to be loyal. Happy partners are more likely to sell HP. The Goal: 1 platform, globally, to enable 100% of their partners. 

11:10AM - HP Keynote The old portal: "...finding a needle in a haystack of needles..."

11:05AM - HP Keynote Anne Anderson is awesome. Proof you can give a business presentation and make it fun.  

Background context on HP's partner portal: 250K Partners, 650K Users, 174 Countries, 25 Languages, and 7 different partner portals, 10+ year old tech, link farms, 78% of content was > 1 year old, 56 partner portal page user guide... ouch.

10:58AM - HP Keynote Back in the ballroom waiting for Anne Anderson of HP to present on their partner portal. Meanwhile, these giant foam letters are awesome. I wonder if I can fit a couple of these into the overhead bins on the plane to bring home to my kids.

10:40AM - Mobile Content and Design Best Practices I caught a couple of good tips from the nose bleed seats:

• Optimize your mobile site for speed. Make images and videos smaller for mobile. Be device specific so desktop versions of media/images aren't causing a delay. 
• Use appropriate input methods for forms. For example, if you're asking for a number, don't give them the full keyboard, give them the number keypad. Or if appropriate, things like a slider. 
• Do inline validation on mobile forms. You want to help them correct issues before they submit the page and wait for the next page to load. This helps improve the experience so they don't have to load a page on a slow mobile connection only to see an error. 

10:31AM - Breakout Sessions Phew. Just ran from the keynote, delivered a whirlwind presenation, and got out of the way for a couple of our design/content experts Paul Hanaoka and Martin Yan who are doing a presentation on best practices for mobile content and design. It's standing room only for those guys. Awesome. I'll try and get some best practices for you guys but I'm sitting in the hallway trying to hear them. 

9:34AM - Ok, gotta run. Presenting in a few minutes on applying the buyer's journey to web design. Be back in a bit. 

9:32AM - Keynote Liferay 7 and Mobile: Liferay Screens is ready made interfaces for mobile pre-wired to your Liferay Platform. 

9:31AM - Keynote Liferay 7 and Modern Web Experiences: Web has evolved and so have we. 

9:30AM - Keynote Liferay 7 and Modularity: Shorten cycles, release assets, simplify development.

9:26AM - Keynote Bryan: We want to change the way you approach customers. To be able to meet customers where they’re at. To meet customer needs the moment when they engage. Part of our vision with Liferay 7 is to unify all the interaction on one platform: web, mobile, kiosk, in-person, IoT, etc. 

9:21AM - Keynote Bryan's now talking about Liferay 7!

9:17AM - Keynote CEO Bryan Cheung is now up sharing his insights on digial business transformation and how it's... transforming business. Drones are changing acriculture. Disney is delighting their guests in new ways with wristbands. Transformation is possible because of agility in the business, leveraging technology, and understanding our customer and giving them what they need.  

9:05AM - Keynote Henry Nakamura is up kicking off the keynote session. Henry claims that Liferay's Gartner MQ Leader status is due to him working at Liferay. He also notes that the other leaders combined have an approximate market cap of $700B. 

8:30AM - Hello from Chicago! Ok, I’ve had my coffee, and starting to feel a little more human. So I’m ready to talk with real life actual people! Hi everyone. My name is Jason and I’m with Liferay Marketing. I’ll be posting live blog updates throughout the day from the 2015 Liferay North America Symposium. 

Let me know if there’s anything you want to see in the comments. I’ll do my best to cover that for you. 

#LRNAS2015