2015 Liferay North America Symposium - Tuesday's Live Blog

Alright. It's a wrap, folks. It's been my honor to live blog for all of you who were following along. See you at #LRNAS2016!

Looking for day 1's coverage? Here you go.

4:23PM - Closing Keynote: Digital Transformation: Beyond Technology | Bryan Cheung, CEO

Some brief concluding thoughts from our CEO:

Technology matters… but it’s not as important as we think. The human to human interaction is still the most important thing and technology isn't always needed to create a poignant and memorable experience. It's ultimately about delighting the customer. 

Liferay’s vision is to see people reach their full potential to serve others. As long as our technology and business help you serve others, we are happy. A big thank you to all our attendees and customers who came to speak. 

2:15PM - A couple other Symposium features

SPEED CONSULTING - At the North America Symposium, you can sign up for speed consulting sessions with Liferay Global Services Consultants. No SOW, no engagement manager, no on-site consultant expenses... FREE! Granted, they only last like... I'm not sure how long they last. Probably no more than a half hour. But it's a great way to get some super valuable feedback on a problem by experienced consultants who have seen tons of implementations. 

EXPERT EXCHANGE - This is basically 30 minute speed dates with various experts on various topics, both technical and business. Here, Ray Augé leads a group discussion on "Maintainability in the Face of Modularity". 

2:05PM - Eduardo Lundgren

Milliseconds matter. 10 milliseconds on an e-commerce site negatively impacts sales. How tiny delays can impact user experience:

Perception is just as important as actual speed:

1:45PM - Building Awesome UX with Liferay Single Page Applications (Liferay 7) | Eduardo Lundgren

Web Browser Single Page Applications (SPA) done right: 

  • SEO and Bookmarkable - Unique URLs despite the fact that you look like you're never leaving the browser page. Cache strings so your memory doesn't explode.
  • State retention - When you click back, you need to retain the previous state.
  • Cached content without additional request - speeds up user experience.
  • Pending Navigation - Block the UI rendering until data is loaded. So they see the current content with a loading indicator on top of that. They know it's working and can still visually browse the content on the current page. 
  • Indicate to the user that something is happening - Loading indicator
  • Must detect Time outs and provide a helpful 404 or other message.
  • Mimic native browser behavior
  • SENNA - A blazing fast single page application engine. Sounds speedy. 

1:22PM - James Falkner's Community Update

Some highlights:

  • 33,200 community posts in 12,824 thread.
  • Only 7.6% of the threads have no response. That's way down from 2014's 19.7%
  • Liferay.com's top 10 new registrations by country: USA, India, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, China, Brazil, UK, and Canada.
  • We have 55 downloads of Liferay from Antarctica. James likes to think it's by researchers. I'm thinking bad data quality. Marketers.
  • Community Explorers
    • Most interested in WCM, Platform, UI, Liferay 7, helping others, tomcat, etc.
    • Least intereseted in: IE...

11:33AM - Liferay Training & Conference Exibitor Hall 

As a quick aside here, grabbed a couple of quick photos of two really great features at Symposium. The ability to talk to trainers, partners, and Liferay consultants. If you ask around you can find product managers, engineering leads, customer support managers, C-levels, etc. And they're all super approachable and happy to chat and learn more about your projects, your challenges, and your feedback. 

Some of our awesome Liferay trainers. These guys know the product inside out. Need an in-house Liferay expert? Train your own. These guys have both business and developer oriented training programs. Check out the training site to learn more about these programs and certification programs.

There's a lot of Liferay expertise in the exhibitor hall. You can swing by the Liferay booth and get a Liferay 7 demo or evaluate several potential System Integrators all in one room. 

I really need a bathroom break. But I'm in the front row and don't want to walk out on Ed Chung. 

11:22AM - Product Road Map | Ed Chung, VP Product Management

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads. One of the most valuable things about the Liferay North America Symposium is getting an overview of the product roadmap from Ed Chung. 

11:08AM - Pulse Awards James Falkner and Henry Nakamura

10:58AM - Jorge Ferrer

Modularity is going to allow us to ship features much faster to customers. Don't have to wait for big releases. Speaking of big releases... when is 7 coming out?! Glad you asked:

Dang it, didn't get a picture of that timeline slide. So ellusive.

CE comes out in Q1 2016. EE comes out "a few weeks" after.

And then new features ship quickly after that (in 2016).

What browsers are supported? "We support modern browsers. Safari, Chrome, Firefox. IE... yeah, we gotta check." (That was my paraphrase. Imagine him saying that in a really cool Inigo Montoya accent.) 

10:53AM - Jorge Ferrer

Wow. Liferay 7 automatically converts any Portlet into a SPA (single page application)! 

Benefits:

  • From 2 seconds to .7 seconds
  • From 1300 KB to 67.9 KB
  • From 42 requests to 11 requests

SPA technology is really cool.

Live blogging is hard. Multi-tasking skills to the max. 

10:46AM - Jorge Ferrer

New image selector:

Really cool new image editor in Liferay 7! Instagram like. This feature got some applause. It is pretty sweet. Ironic that my picture really needs editing:

 

Other stuff:

In context tool bars. Minimized top level tool bars for editing/WYSIWYG. Editing options are inline.

New blogging experience.

A few things about modularity:

Liferay 7 is a microservices platform. In-VM. 

This means you can develop more modular features and services, connect them, and reuse them more than ever before. 

This helps shorten development cycles.

This lets your release small assets whenever you want. More release more often. 

10:41AM - Jorge Ferrer

Sneak peak at metrics. Jorge didn't talk much. Still a little mysterious but exciting. 

@mentions in your blog entries and comments. 

Mobile Tools: Mobile SDK, Liferay Screens, and Liferay Push

With these tools you can rapidly create a mobile app that leverages all the services from your website and develop really cool audience targeted/mobile customer experiences. We've got a retail use case demo of this in the booth. I'm going to have to check it out and report back to you later. 

10:24AM - Liferay 7 Feature Tour | Jorge Ferrer, VP Engineering

The Product Vision

  • Creating great web and mobile digital experiences
  • Engaging and understanding users
  • Unifying the digital journey

Web and Mobile Experiences - New Liferay 7 Features

  • Create modern web sites with less effort
    • Shipping with 4 gorgeous out of the box site themes
    • Maintain more easily, too
  • Help content authors create engaging content quickly
    • Easily look at the differences between content versions
  • New localization capabilities
    • Email based notifications
    • RTL languages
    • Site and template titles
  • Approval workflow and subscriptions per folder or content type
  • Geolocation features
    • Content and docs can be geolocated

10:07AM - Henry Nakamura Exits the room in a puff of smoke. Probably has to MC downstairs or go save a company. Dude is such a boss. 

10:05AM - Henry Nakamura

Key takeways

  1. Start small (because this is a multi year process)
  2. Identify a team (likely people in multiple departments)
  3. Focus on a journey map (need to understand how customers interact with the customer)
  4. Measure (make decisions on facts, not guesses)
  5. Manage expectations (this is a multi year process)

10:02AM - Henry Nakamura Customer Persona Journey Mapping. Very frequent theme at Symposium this year. 

9:49AM - The Age of the Customer | Henry Nakamura

No pictures of Mr. Nakamura, Supreme Leader of Liferay's customer experience (yesterday, he promoted himself to a Director on stage). He's practically presenting in the dark. Shadowy character, that guy.

Home Depot now takes returns without a receipt if you pay with a credit card. That's a differentiator. That's a disruptor because we'd choose to shop there if Lowe's doesn't match that service. 

>80% of CEOs think they have an excellent customer service. Only 8% of cusotmers agree.

The Five Rules

1. Need executive endorsement

2. Departmental alignment

3. Identify the team

4. Measure 

5. Evaluate and iterate

The Five Tools

1. Journey Map

2. Movemennts of Truth

3. Voice of the Customer

4. Net Promoter Score/Sat. Measure - Ranking of how happy or satsified your customer is.

5. Data

9:46AM - Good morning! More updates coming today. Just snuck into Henry Nakamura's presentation entitled "THE AGE OF THE CUSTOMER: JOURNEY MAPPING AND THE UNSTOPPABLE RISE OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT". Sorry for the ALL CAPS yelling. I copied/pasted that title.  

Got a bit of a late start this morning and I didn't even drink last night. 

Blogs
Good job Jason, really informative, great stuff both days.
Hey Ruud, thanks. Constructive feedback is welcome. This was honestly an experiment to see if the Liferay community would find it valuable. I think the content is too business oriented (but I'm a business guy so that's going to be a given). It might be helpful to have a developer blogger, too, who can post highlights for our technical community members.