Earlier this year, Liferay announced their Markeplace, where you could go to get applications for Liferay and also deliver applications for others. Application stores are becoming commonplace with Apple, Google, Blackberry all having app stores for their devices. IBM has long had their portlet catalog where developers could upload applications for WebSphere Portal.
Liferay understands that for their system to be considered a true ‘platform’, they needed their own application store. For users, the Marketplace is a way to accelerate to me to market as they can find pre-built apps for the portal. For developers the Marketplace provides an easy distribution channel for their apps. Finally for Liferay, the Marketplace becomes a central repository where they can help maintain quality control over applications.
Here at the Liferay 2012 Symposium, Brian. Kim, Liferay’s Chief Operating Officer talked about how the Marketplace is doing and their future plans. On Aug 1 they Launched with 50 apps developed by Liferay.
Initially Liferay planned to open Marketplace to company developers only, but now they are opening Marketplace to individual developers. So starting today, Marketplace is now open for other contributors besides Liferay itself. Contributed applications will go through an approval process to help ensure quality is maintained.
Liferay is now trying to figure out how to implement paid licensing for Marketplace. Of course, paid licensing is not an easy thing to implement, as their are lots of issues to deal with, like currency, sales tax, legal agreements, export laws, etc. Liferay promises to manage the collection and payment of sales tax.
New features of Marketplace will include faceted search and improved metrics. Further in the future, Liferay is looking to white label the Marketplace, create private channels, and improving profile pages.
We have also started a Liferay Market Place -related open discussion group on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Liferay-Community-Applications-4693759).
These discussions are about helping developers of Liferay Comminity Plugins in identifying pricing, bundling and marketing their portal applications.