I had the opportunity to attend the Liferay User Group in Denver this past week. Perficient and Liferay hosted the event covering topics; OSGi on Liferay, presented by Perficient’s Daniel Moshi (link to post) and Liferay in the Government sector presented by Liferay’s Johnnie Stubbs. After the respected presentations, we opened up the group for roundtable discussion.
During the discussion, we talked about reasons to implement portal technology and most all of the reasons shared the theme of integration.
“We want integration in our social community for collaboration.”
“Our organization manages “x” agencies and all of those piles of technology need to be integrated for functionality.”
“We need to integrate our content management for marketing automation.”
“We need integration for knowledge sharing.”
In hearing this central theme, I sat with Johnnie for a few moments afterward to pinpoint 3 best practices that companies need to put into place when beginning integration.
He sits for a second and we flesh out details… After a few minutes, he sits back, silent for a moment, then says, “You know what, there is only one. The #1 Best Practice for successful integration is proper architectural review on the front end of your project. Then you can begin development with an architecture that is modular, efficient, secure and most importantly open and flexible.”
Johnnie continues, stating that proper architecture can save months on the backend when it comes time to deployment.
Spending a little extra time ensuring you have proper architecture allows you to:
- Identify up front what out of the box features from Liferay can be used for your project. With 70 plus portlets available out of the box considerable developer time may be saved by customizing the existing feature set.
- Upgrades and patches to go more smoothly the less you modify the core of Liferay because you aren’t coding things that will break with every patch or bug fix.
- Less time spent in design, load balancing, performance, and continuous testing.
Like an Swiss Army Knife, Liferay provides the user with a tool with many functions. A proper architectural review can ensure your organization is putting the Liferay toolset to its best use. This means providing you an excellent and convenient platform and environment to integrate your existing systems into a unified interface and user experience. Whether you are designing a portal, an intranet, or a website, Liferay provides the underlying infrastructure to make it work.
