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3

Vivek Agarwal is our CTO and VP of the Digital Experience Solutionspractice at XTIVIA. Vivek and his team have implemented hundreds ofsuccessful Portal and CMS technology solutions at enterprise and mid-sized clients since the year 2000, and he is considered a thought-leader inthe digital experience space.

His team provides consulting, architecture, implementation, and supportservices around digital experience platforms, portals, content management,collaboration, integration, and other enterprise software.

Prior to his current responsibilities, Vivek served as a Systems Architect,delivering multiple global projects using Enterprise Java, Portal, andCMS technologies. He was also a member of the prestigious IBM GoldConsultant program.

About the Author

As many of you know we have been working for 10+ years on theLiferay platform, ever since the Liferay v3.6 days (circa 2006), andhave seen the platform evolve and grow significantly over the yearswith each release. The recent release of Liferay Digital ExperiencePlatform (DXP) 7.0 has seen a significant transformation of the Liferayplatform from multiple perspectives - market positioning to begin withbut more importantly being better aligned to affect change at allstages of the customer journey, while also enabling partners andemployees to interact with customers to influence sentiment andsupport the relationship. The XTIVIA team and I will be writing morearticles about what makes a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)different from a portal, why you should embrace DXP, why Liferay DXPis a great choice and more.

However, this article is not about the DXP features of Liferay 7 such asCampaign Manager and Single Customer View - some of thesefeatures will only be available later in the year and we will have anarticle that talks to them. Also Liferay DXP 7.0 has many developer-oriented changes and enhancements that introduce a seismic shift inthe Liferay developer toolbox such as OSGi-based modularity,ElasticSearch replacing Lucene as the default search engine, SPAEnabler that magically transforms all portlets into Single PageApplications, new Liferay extension points like Portlet Filters, supportfor Bootstrap 3 and Java 8, Blade CLI to create new Liferay modules,and much more - however if you were hoping to read more about thesethen I am sorry to disappoint you - this article is not for the Liferaydeveloper.

Introduction

4

So what is this article about?

Well, well - Liferay DXP 7 incorporates a plethora of new features andimprovements in the areas of Web Experience Management,Document Management and Collaboration, and Business Productivity,and this article is about my top 10 favorites among these. Some ofthese were easy to pick as they are big-bang features that affect mostLiferay customers and many of XTIVIA’s own customers haveexperienced the need for these - on the other hand given the vastnumber of features to pick from, determining what makes the cut andwhat features to leave out involved some tough choices and I am sureyou can make a case for some that I left out. However, a top 10 listwithout some controversy (check out one of my previous articles TOP10 REASONS WHY LIFERAY IS THE BEST ENTERPRISE PORTALPRODUCT that provoked some controversy) is no fun!

Without further ado, let me dive into my top 10 list -

5

6

Top of the list are the seismic changes and improvements in Liferayforms which has undergone a huge overhaul starting with the UI of theForm Designer and adding various advanced capabilities including –

1. Splitting a form into multiple pages so that you can create wizard-like forms

2. Ability to control the layout of the form including organizing formfields into multiple columns on a given form page. This can alsosupport complex layouts wherein each row can have a differentnumber of columns.

3. Ability to populate a form dropdown (i.e. a Select field) with aREST Data Provider - this can be extremely useful when you needto let a user pick a value from a list, where the list of values comefrom some back-end system such as SAP, Salesforce, OracleeBusiness Suite, and others.

4. Conditional display/hiding of a field - i.e. making a field appearbased on the value entered into another field

5. Enabling workflow for the form6. Providing a predefined value or a placeholder value for a given

field7. Validating fields using a number of different criteria8. Incorporating captcha into a form9. Redirecting users to a landing page (or a specific URL) after a form

submission

1. Liferay Forms

7

Figure 1: Revamped Liferay DXP 7 Form Designer

8

Geolocation is a new feature in Liferay DXP 7 that enables you to addthe geographic coordinates where an asset was created, as metadatato your assets. You can add geolocation metadata to your webcontent, data lists, and documents & media. This feature is providedfor you out-of-the-box by Liferay Portal 7 including visualization viaAsset Publisher.

2. Geolocate Content & Documents

Figure 2: Map Visualization of Liferay Assets

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10

Before Liferay 7, when you wanted to share a web content structure ortemplate between different sites you had to put this common item inthe Global scope. Starting with Liferay 7, you can share these artifactswith your child sites. As the administrator of a child site, you will beable to use all the structures, templates, categories, application displaytemplates, and data definitions (dynamic data lists) from any of yourparent sites that allow for it (this can be disabled in Site Settings).

4. Content Sharing Between Sites

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13

Liferay DXP 7 introduces Lexicon which is Liferay's ExperienceLanguage, providing styling guidelines and best practices for designingyour web applications inside and outside of Liferay. Lexicon is anextension of Bootstrap's existing framework, and designed to be fluidand extensible for the user. Lexicon defines styles for various UIelements including alerts, badges, dropdowns, pagination, progressbars, and much more - for a complete list refer to Lexicon’s github site.Liferay DXP 7 leverages Lexicon to completely revamp the UI ofvarious out-of-the-box applications to be modern and consistent -additionally, you can use Lexicon for your custom applications toensure consistency with the out-of-the-box components.

7. Lexicon

Figure 7: Lexicon Sample - Site Members Application

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15

Liferay 7 now allows you to configure different workflows for differentweb content folders as well as different web content structures - as anexample, this makes it easier to put press releases and HRannouncements through their own specific workflows. Additionally(and this is where the ++ comes in), you can now restrict a given webcontent folder to only allow web content of a specific type (i.e.structure).

And from an end user perspective, they can now subscribe to specificweb content folders. Users should be able to filter notifications perweb content type as well. Users that are subscribed will receive anemail every time a web content article is added within the scope of thesubscription. And in case you are wondering, the emails will beconfigurable using a template, in a way consistent with all other emailnotifications in Liferay.

9. Web Content Folder/Type Specific Workflows++

16

The developer in me could not resist including this one - while on thesurface OSGi-based modularity smells like an architect / developeroriented feature, you will care about modularity even if you are abusiness stakeholder. Modularity results in a more agile platform thatshortens develop-deploy-test cycles, and allows for more frequentreleases of both custom and Liferay DXP platform features. Thisreduces the time it takes to get new functionality in the hands of end-users and benefits you - both the business stakeholder of the Liferay-based system and the end-user.

10. Modularity

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