Upgrade to Liferay DXP 

Digital Experience Software tailored to your needs

To infinity and beyond

Recently we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Its been a hell of a ride and the internet has had a profound impact on our society and daily lives. You better brace yourself, ever since I got started in the internet business in the mid 90’s of the last century I witness an ever increasing speed of innovation.

How do you keep up with that as an organisation? Slowing down is not an option, on the contrary your organisation will need to adapt its business processes and keep evolving digitally to satisfy customers, users and other stakeholders.

Ask yourself: Are you doing the right thing?

Since you are reading this chances are you may be familiar with the Liferay Platform. As you probably know Gartner rates Liferay as a leader in the Magical Quadrant of Portals and now Digital Experience Platforms. The only way for Liferay to stay on top is by innovating and enhancing the Liferay Platform continuously. And we do that for the good of our loyal customers, so make sure  you benefit from our investments and innovation. Most certainly you’ll have to justify spending money because an upgrade project is not budget neutral.

Business Value

The very popular version Liferay 6.2 was released almost 6 years ago. In internet time this is forever and Liferay has a reputation for innovation, so simple put if you are not running Liferay DXP chances are your missing out. Think about how your business will benefit from 6 more year of enhancements and innovation to the platform. 

Assume for one moment that ‘digital is the new normal’ then it makes perfect sense to stay in sync with the latest and greatest version of Liferay’s Digital Experience Platform.

The revised architecture of the Liferay DXP platform and the out-of-the-box functionality is unprecedented. Liferay’s own product management / software engineering teams have a high pace of innovation which contineous to bring you more business value.

Due to this high speed of innovation there is another advantage, with Liferay DXP business users will be more autonomous and be able to use advanced features (like creating and publishing content, create and edit pages and define multi pages forms.) without IT support.

Liferay DXP 7.x has so much more to offer in terms of

  • functionality in DXP 7.x
  • an even more modular microservices based architecture
  • faster time to market
  • optional add-on products (Liferay Commerce, Liferay Analytics Cloud)
  • easier upgrades to future versions
  • Liferay DXP Cloud.

With Liferay DXP your organisation is ready to face the challenges of the digital future and will enjoy an even greater return on investment in Liferay’s technology.

As a Liferay customer we encourage you to consume and apply the massive amount of features and functionality for your business. And this means you’ll need to upgrade. There is no change nor gain without a little bit of pain.

Upgrading

While it is true that our white paper says “If you upgraded from prior versions of Liferay (DXP), you’ll know that upgrades can be a time- and resource-intensive project.” Now don’t be scared or discouraged by this. We’ll guide you in the steps and it is not as bad as the whitepaper may lead you to believe. On the contrary, and the good news is that the benefits are huge and once you have upgraded to Liferay DXP each upgrade will be easier. So let’s focus on moving from Liferay 6.2 to Liferay DXP first.

Software Life cycle / End of Service Life

If you are still on Liferay 6.2 you miss out on the many features and optional extensions but first of all you need to be aware that software has a life cycle and inevitable there will be an End of Service Life. This goes for the Liferay Platform but also for the underlying software stack. We also urge you to check the service life of the Operating System, Database,  Application Server, JDK etc..

Plan and budget now to upgrade your Liferay 6.2 environment to Liferay DXP. Be aware an upgrade of a software platform is a project!

I strongly advice you to start your upgrade project  at the very latest in the first half 2020 to avoid approaching the Liferay 6.2 EOL date which I remind you is december 1st 2020.

Minimising risk

Many years ago at corporate level in a large enterprise I discovered a subsidiary company was running a Portal Solution which represented a sizeable amount of their business. To my horror and amazement they had failed to keep pace with the new releases of the portal software. Even to a point where the product was EOL and the business application was without support. The problem with this was that they had putting multi-million euro’s of revenue at risk. But even worse the reputation of the company was also at risk!

With GDPR in place you should be aware that running on unsupported software that is EOL you will be more vulnerable to security breaches. I assume you don’t want to be the focal point of attention for the wrong reasons. Running business critical applications on software that is EOL is a major risk and something you’ll want to steer away from at all cost..

Invest now in your upgrade to Liferay DXP and be more flexible tomorrow.

Contact your Account Manager to discuss your upgrade plan, in the meantime checkout these documents and visit help.liferay.com.

Reference Documents

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Blogs

I am evalutating to choose Liferay to create a website for my company, but a colleague of mine told me that adopting page templates together with both web content and page versioning in a staged configuration is not possible, since a reset & propagate issue will arise and I will need to switch off page versioning to fix it (DXP 7.0).  If so, it would be impossible to adopt Liferay with a distributed newsroom. So, are really templates + versioning + staging not compatible?

 

 

For completeness: The discussion on this topic (page templates & staging etc.) has been carried over to the forums: https://community.liferay.com/forums/-/message_boards/message/113200705