(TORONTO, Canada – June 4, 2019 – 5:00 AM) We at Veriday are very pleased to announce that Liferay’s new version of DXP, 7.2 has been released this morning. This next iteration of Liferay’s Digital Experience Platform helps businesses scale digital transformation efforts; this includes enhancements to Cloud, Commerce, and Content capabilities. As the Platinum Partner in North America, we wanted to share some excerpts from the press release, and a breakdown of the main themes of this upgrade. Feel free to contact us and we can walk you through this new version of Liferay and how your business can leverage them to deliver the best experiences for your users.
Liferay, Inc., which makes software that helps companies create digital experiences on the web, mobile and connected devices, today announced the launch of the latest versions of Liferay DXP and Liferay Commerce and the global availability of Liferay DXP Cloud. Designed to meet the needs of today’s digital-first business teams to create experiences rapidly across channels and streamline IT operations, the new releases of Liferay’s products equip enterprises with easy-to-use and reusable content management and personalization tools along with the flexibility of a decoupled CMS architecture, all powered by the benefits of the cloud. “The ability to quickly deliver relevant and personalized digital experiences for customers at scale across touchpoints has become an imperative for business success,” said Ed Chung, VP of Products for Liferay. “As businesses look to cater to customers on their preferred channels headless delivery is becoming increasingly important. Liferay DXP 7.2 delivers the capabilities of a headless CMS so businesses have the flexibility to meet customers on their preferred channel or device.”
To help understand everything you need to know about the new release, we have broken down the biggest features into four pillars. These four pillars of Liferay DXP 7.2. enhancements strengthen the capabilities in content management and personalization.
Create Experiences
Content Pages and Page Fragments was one of the key features introduced in Liferay 7.1. It allows web developers to design pages and include fragments that can be editable through a rich text editor. Content pages were designed to accelerate and simplify content creation, especially for non-technical users when using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-based pages. In 7.2. Content Pages is taken one step further to be even more user-friendly. With the Fragments Sidebar, users can drag-and-drop fragment elements. Additionally, it is now easier for frontend developers to create those fragments. They are now able to create them inside of Liferay and export them or import them from their preferred tool. The last enhancement to Content Pages is the JS Widget Creator tool. It allows for non-Java developers to create the structure of the desired widget with placeholders which can then be handed off for additional Java code.
Another way 7.2. helps to create experiences is through several new content features, the first being Content Sets. Content Sets utilize the power asset publisher and decoupling it from the widget itself. Now content can be dynamically or manually selected for personalized content sets and be exposed through APIs. The second feature that has been asked about for a long time is Content Usages. This allows users to know the number of times and the pages where a piece of content is being displayed, as well as being able to preview the page context in which it sits. Finally, there is Change Lists. This feature is only being released in beta but will be updated in the coming months. It serves as an alternative to staging that eliminates the need to replicate each side. Users can create groups of changes to be published and view past and future changes.
Personalize Experiences
In previous versions, user segmentation was achieved using the Liferay Audience Targeting plugin from the marketplace. It was limited to basic segmentation and only personalizing content. Now this functionality is built in natively. It now allows for advanced segmentation, more assets to be personalized (i.e. entire pages, navigation, layouts, and content sets). In addition to the content experience, segmentation management has been improved. Segments are built out using extensive rule opportunities and complex operators including user, organization, session properties, even custom fields. When enterprises connect Liferay Analytics Cloud to Liferay DXP 7.2. this will synchronize user segments between both platforms. Additionally, all the large amounts of data that is required for better real-time personalization is offloaded into analytics cloud which prevents the data from slowing down the core platform.
Manage Digital Assets
Two new features are being introduced that will help users like marketers to easily manage large volumes of assets. The first feature is Auto-Tagging. Built on exposed APIs, assets like images, text, and web content are analyzed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to automatically apply tags. The second is improvements to the UX for scalability. Now users will have the ability to take bulk actions on assets and be able to set tags and categories in large batches with a single click.
Think Headless
The final pillar addresses the trends in technology to be agile in creating a headless technology stack. Liferay recognizes that its rich UI may not always be appropriate for the specific use cases. Using APIs, users can create and manage in Liferay and push information to other platforms without any manipulations. These APIs interacts with Liferay’s permission model so that users are still receiving the information that is relevant to them even if displayed outside of the Liferay platform. Some common use cases of leveraging Liferay in a headless environment are:
- Using Liferay as a content repository and authoring environment but the frontend is built on an entirely custom UI like AngularJS.
- Enable an omnichannel experience. For example, using the Forms API to input the data fields into a chatbot experience.
- Accessing Liferay through an integration layer like Mulesoft or Talend where you might push product data into the Liferay content engine or want to administer the platform from a command line interface
Liferay is based on the OpenAPI 3.0 standard. It’s a widely used standard for defining API specifications, the availability of tools for testing and building, as well as it being supported out of the box by many different products and platforms.
Customers are more demanding than ever at a time when IT resources are limited. With Liferay DXP 7.2, enterprises are empowered to quickly build and deliver meaningful experiences to their customers with features like content recommendations and auto-tagging. Developers are empowered to use their preferred tools via decoupled CMS. New REST APIs provides access to structured content, document management, categories, keywords and more.
The release of Liferay DXP 7.2. is very exciting and it adds even more enhancements to allow enterprises to create exceptional digital experiences. If you want to learn more about Liferay DXP and the features of version 7.2, please contact us!
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