Forced into Liferay

I have always been a SharePoint guy.  I have spoken at SharePoint Saturdays and user groups all over the US.  Now that I am a full time employee at NORC, I am being saddled with all portals and collaboration tools to include... Liferay. What is it? What does it mean? 

Liferay markets itself as the best portal. Wow. Bold statement. Gartner places them in the top right quadrant repeatedly so I guess they have that going for them. To better learn and understand this product, I am attending the Liferay Symposium in Chicago. It is Liferays big yearly conference featuring the best and brightest of Liferay. 

Keep in mind, I have attended many SharePoint events ranging from SharePoint conferences by Microsoft to volunteer run SharePoint Saturdays. These are my observations after 1/2 day:

"Over 600 attendees" is more a SharePoint Saturday than a global product conference. It is true the conference brought people from all over the globe. 

Sausage festival. Do you think part of the reason this product is lacking in market share is because you don't have enough women in your technology. 

Talk about the product more. My first two sessions and the keynote by the CEO showed very little about the actual Liferay product. Your next release is "modular", have sessions on the modules. 

Lastly, share. SharePoint started at about the same time as Liferay. The community itself shared information with each other, and customers to help gain traction and adoption. There is a reason so many people use it now... It is because we share information with each other in forums, user groups, and more. 

We will see if it gets any better. 

Comments

jhf said…
Hey John - I'm the community guy for Liferay (James Falkner) - thanks for coming to Chicago! We have a large and diverse global community and are always encouraging local user groups to form (and help them when they do). We also have an active forum and set of bloggers that participate on and off of liferay.com. We are acutely aware of the male skew in our industry and are always trying to find, encourage, and celebrate women and other underrepresented groups in our community. We have 6 women speaking (1 keynote) over these two days in Chicago, but we can do better! As for the tech, there are many more sessions and workshops to come that go into great detail on the product which I think you will find informative. Thanks again for coming and hope to see you here! (I'm apparently the only one with a pink shirt).
1:51 PM
nasreen basu said…
brillant piece of information, I had come to know about your web-page from my friend hardkik, chennai,i have read atleast 9 posts of yours by now, and let me tell you, your webpage gives the best and the most interesting information. This is just the kind of information that i had been looking for, i'm already your rss reader now and i would regularly watch out for the new posts, once again hats off to you! Thanx a million once again, Regards, liferay training in hyderabad

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