Update on Marketplace

As you know, Liferay announced the Liferay Marketplace with much fanfare last year. In developing the Liferay Marketplace, we had to take an approach different from those that target consumers of mobile devices (such as Apple's wildly successful App Store). We have been feverishly working on its release since then, and are planning to open the marketplace for beta testing in April! This is later than our original date, but I think it will be worth the wait. Through feedback at events, online, and internally, we have decided to delay the release to add in several new enterprise-level features outlined below.

Company Registration and Profiles

One of the features that we’ve been focusing on is the ability for companies and organizations to maintain their company profile on the Marketplace. This profile will allow organizations to establish a presence above and beyond the set of apps they produce. Details such as company logos, descriptions, website links, marketplace activity, and apps will be made available from company profiles.

Company Users

Individual app authors can be associated with a company, such that the apps that they produce are also associated with their company. This is a typical case for companies of all sizes that produce multiple apps. Potentially, one or two
 technical resources can then be assigned to manage the apps on behalf of the company and also manage the company’s user list.

Company Purchases

In many cases, IT departments want to have more control over the purchasing of licenses for apps that are used across the company. Alternatively, they might wish to restrict the set of apps that are allowed within their networks. To that end, on the Liferay Marketplace, IT administrators can bulk-purchase licenses on behalf of the company (and using the company credit card), giving immediate access to these apps by users (employees) associated with the company.

Metrics

Everyone, including Liferay, wants to know how they are doing. For this, fine- grained reports with pretty graphs can be generated for a number of different metrics, including purchases, views, downloads, etc. You can quickly spot trends in your apps and get reports about things like revenue, downloads, etc.

The Rest

All of the other features of Marketplace are more or less as described in the current Marketplace information. There have been some slight tweaks to improve workflows for app developers, and improvements in User Profiles as well.

So please bear with us as we prepare to launch the Liferay Marketplace. It's coming together nicely, and it is an important milestone for the Liferay Platform! We hope you like it!

[Wilson Man]

very cool!!! looking forward to seeing what our community will produce in the marketplace!

[Atul Patel]

Congratulations on all the prgrss.

[Luis Mas]

What about of comunity users (freelancers, frikies, etc) that would like to contribute through the marketplace? I mean people that would like to contribute in the same way as you can in Wordpress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/)

[James Falkner]

Luis,

This will be possible - individual developers will be able to publish apps to the Liferay Marketplace, just as one can with Wordpress plugins and other marketplaces.

[Mark Stein]

Is marketplace now online? I would like to join to it, but I cann't find any "join to marketplace" link

[James Falkner]

Mark - the Marketplace is not yet open. soon though! Sorry this isn't all that helpful, but I'm reluctant to set an official date. All major roadblocks have been cleared though, so it shouldn't be much longer!