Today’s world is digitally driven as customers are on the continuous lookout for the easiest ways to connect with their favorite brands. However, these rapidly exceeding customer expectations challenge businesses to uphold their positions in the dynamic market. As innovation and digital technology continue to advance, many businesses are adopting a customer-focused business strategy. They are transforming their presence with seamless digital customer experiences. To achieve this, they are implementing one of the most opted solutions for enhancing their customer engagement and experience, which is Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs).

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an integrated framework that combines an array of Enterprise software, ranging from contextualized digital experiences, Content management, analytics, and personalization, to optimization and automation of operations. The solution is gaining popularity with the exponential rise in digitalization. According to a Gartner report, over 80% of B2B and B2C organizations will shift to digital-first business models by 2025, creating a need for DXP solutions. In such a scenario, it’s not a matter of if but when your business is ready to adopt a digital experience platform to improve its customer experience.

Understanding Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) refers to brand-customer interactions and the overall impression left on a customer’s mind regarding a company’s products, services, and processes. It is evaluated by following the entire customer journey, including the pre-sale, purchase, and post-sale stages. It considers all the touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a business.

Understand customer experience with a simplified example. Let’s say a customer leaves with a positive experience during the purchase and post-use of a product. This experience will then lead them to come back to the same brand, to increase customer loyalty and effortless word-of-mouth marketing. Contrarily, if a customer exits due to a bad experience, it will result in lost customer trust and damaged brand reputation.

But is Customer Experience Really Important?

Customer experience is the journey of a customer from pre-sales to post-purchase of a product. Every interaction with your customers leaves them with a perception of your brand. These feelings and thoughts then decide the growth and success of your business. When done right, customer experience can bring you the following business benefits:

How to measure customer experience?

From surveys to feedback forms, today businesses can adopt tens of ways to measure customer experiences. Here are guaranteed ways to gauge your existing customer experience:

Define Customer Experience Management (CXM)

CXM responsibly handles the entire customer journey – the initial customer interaction, purchase experience, and post-purchase support. It gives you a clear understanding of customer needs and preferences. By improving your customer experience management, you can improve your personalized customer experience delivery, build customer loyalty, and create brand advocates.

In short, CXM is a multifaceted approach that helps you design, build and improve your complete customer experience. The three key components of CXM include:

Implementing DXPs to improve customer experience

DXPs act as a bridge between a business and its customers to improve customer experience by breaking silos across the organization-wide customer-related functions and operations. It introduces your business to advanced ways to engage customers and meet their expectations.

Drive revenue growth with DXP’s key features

Exceptional customer experience has become the need of the hour for every customer-focused business. The best way to achieve this superior CX is by using DXPs – an advanced solution that gives combines all the customer experience platforms under one roof. Here are some key features that can help you drive revenue growth with DXP:

Your Roadmap to Implementing DXPs

DXP implementation can be overwhelming until you have the right roadmap. With the step-by-step guide given, you can now streamline your processes to meet your customers’ expectations.

Take your Customer Experience to the next level with DXPs

Customer experience has become a differentiating factor for businesses to stand apart from their competitors. With the implementation of Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), businesses get the easiest way to enhance their customer experience by providing personalized, multi-channel experiences across all touchpoints. With the right approach to DXP implementation, businesses can streamline the process and achieve continuous revenue growth.

Don’t let your competitors steal your customers with subpar experiences. Incorporate DXPs into your business strategy today and see the difference it can make.

As customers take the center stage in every successful business, companies are bound to step up their digital experience game. To help them achieve their renewed objectives, businesses are now turning towards Industry 4.0 which is coupled with modern-day technologies and tools. One such advanced solution is the deployment of Enterprise portals.

An enterprise portal is a framework that helps businesses achieve a high level of collaboration and management. It consolidates a business’ digital assets to create compelling customer experiences by building an omnichannel presence. It enables businesses with centralized business operations. Let’s explore what else an enterprise portal is capable of and how it can transform your business completely.

Understanding Enterprise Portal Development

An enterprise portal is a unified ecosystem that combines processes, people, and information, building a secure single source of truth. It provides a knowledge platform for employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders. Using enterprise portals, businesses can create efficient collaboration tools, Content management systems (CMS), workflow management solutions, and a detailed knowledge base.

Here are five major ways in which enterprise portals can help you:

8 Types of Enterprise Portals

Various types of enterprise portals suit different needs and objectives of a business. Some of them help you improve team collaboration while others ensure an improved customer experience. They also help you automate your business processes, and a lot more.

Why does your business need an enterprise portal?

Besides building intuitive customer experiences, businesses generally adopt enterprise portals to streamline their operations, improve productivity and boost customer satisfaction. But of all the enterprise portals mentioned, does your business really need one and can it guarantee continuous business growth and success? It’s a yes if your business is facing any of the listed challenges:

Get the Maximum Benefits of an Enterprise Portal

Enterprise portal services present a great opportunity for your business to achieve success. The benefits of an enterprise portal are undeniable.

Achieve the benefits of an enterprise portal with Liferay. What is Liferay?

Liferay’s enterprise portals can be tailored to the requirements of all kinds of audiences. Liferay offers open-source, Java-based toolsets which allow businesses to create easy and customizable portals, helping them to build solutions to meet their business needs and cater to their audience. These portals can also be integrated with the existing systems without affecting the underlying security system. Liferay’s responsive design ensures seamless functionality across all your devices.

Among various options in the market, why should you choose Liferay?

Liferay is a top choice for leading businesses, especially the ones seeking to digitally transform their business to match the need of the hour. Take a look at the salient features of Liferay and how it can help you enhance your digital presence.

What makes Liferay the Best Technology for Enterprise Portal Development?

Liferay serves as the best technology for an Enterprise portal solution due to its robust architecture, extensive customization options, and strong focus on user experiences. Here’s a list of advantages of using Liferay. Also, check out how Liferay helped other businesses grow.

The Power of Liferay for Enterprise Portal Development

As the demand for enterprise portals is on the rise, businesses seek ways to consolidate digital assets and streamline operations. By implementing an enterprise portal, businesses can achieve numerous benefits, including enhanced collaboration, streamlined workflows, and improved customer engagement. To solve the issues at hand, Liferay stands out as a leading platform for enterprise portal development, offering flexibility, customization options, and user-friendly interfaces. At AIXTOR, we offer exceptional Enterprise Portal Development Services in collaboration with Liferay, enabling you to unlock the full potential of your enterprise portals and stay ahead of the competition.

Ready to take your business operations to the next level with an enterprise portal? Look no further than Liferay. Talk to our experts to understand how you can create a customized solution to meet the unique needs of your business.

As businesses continue to advance their operations toward an online presence, the value of having an effective and versatile migrate cannot be overstated. Liferay DXP has been at the forefront of this movement, offering a powerful suite of tools to help enterprises streamline their digital operations. Complementing its many advantages, Liferay released the latest DXP version with more accessible and customizable options using low code/no-code capabilities. Whether you’re a professional Liferay user or are just considering the platform for the first time, Liferay DXP 7.4’s new features are here to empower you with optimized digital experiences.

Highlights of Liferay DXP 7.4 New Features

Companies today need to offer an engaging and efficient digital experience to their customers if they want to remain competitive in their industry. This is why Liferay DXP 7.4 is an invaluable asset for businesses, as it provides a comprehensive suite of tools and capabilities to optimize digital experiences. From low-code/no-code solutions to data-driven insights, the platform enables users of all technical levels to create, launch, and maintain modern digital experiences. Furthermore, this release is built upon the six key outcome-based themes to ensure that businesses can provide customers with a seamless buying experience. That way, companies can stay ahead of their competition and keep up with the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Let’s take a look at the list of advanced features of Liferay DXP 7.4.

1. Optimized digital experiences with data-driven insights
2. Deliver rich digital experiences to customers
3. Build seamless B2B buying experiences
4. Access to low-code and no-code capabilities
5. Affordable plans to o launch and maintain digital experiences
6. Create a foundation for your interconnected enterprise landscape

Optimized digital experiences with data-driven insights

Now it’s possible to provide personalized, tailored experiences to your customers by leveraging user data to gain insights into user behavior. You can use these insights to tailor content and product recommendations to specific customer interests, helping to increase conversions and customer loyalty. The new feature ensures that your business can delight customers and drive business goals further.

• A/B Testing: Apart from buttons and links, you get the option to select any clickable element on a page y when testing different variants of pages.
• Content Dashboard: Get seamless content filtering with an upgraded Content Audit tool. You can now effortlessly sort your content list by simply clicking on one category in the graph, displaying only the content that’s categorized under your specified vocabulary. Moreover, you can get an all-in-one view of both your Web Content and Documents, from all your sites and Asset Libraries, all in one place and easily filtered by asset type.
• Content Performance: Get insights into Organic and Paid search, social traffic, referrals, and more with detailed referring URL and domain information while taking direct traffic acquisition data from Analytics Cloud.

Deliver rich digital experiences to customers

Get all the features under one roof, from content management to experience creation, making it easier for you to create, manage, and deliver digital content to customers with high quality, efficiency, and scalability. It also helps in building your website search engine friendly.

• Account Management Widget: No more restricted admin access. Deploy the tool on any page of the site and get access to Accounts, Addresses, Assign Users, and even manage Organizations, Groups, and Roles.
• Display Pages: Besides creating Display Pages for Web Content, Documents, and Blogs, you can create them for Categories as well.
• Experiences: Experience creation is much easier now. Duplicate them, save them as a draft, and even can change your default experience for the desired pages.
• Fragments: Now build mega menus with new Dropdown and Menu Display fragments with ease. The new Dropdown fragment lists down all drop zones where you can deploy any other fragment or widget while the upgraded Menu Display fragment gives you access to Navigation Menus.
• Navigation Menus: Get the option to use Display Pages on your Navigation Menus.
• Page Audit: Easily integrate Google PageSpeed for SEO optimization and Accessibility compliance audit reports.
• SEO: Map multiple content fields to SEO and Open Graph meta tag– fill the data dynamically with user content.

Build seamless B2B buying experiences

Convert leads to customers by configuring your solution that closely matches your prospects’ requirements. The upgraded Liferay DXP 7.4 helps you drive consistent sales by simplifying and streamlining your B2B buyer experience.

• Order Type Pricing & Discounts: Change Pricing and Discounts with the altering order conditions.
• Organization Management Widget: Get a visual representation of the complete structure of organizational accounts. For Sales Managers, it means easy sales network management while Agents and Account Managers can navigate their accounts with a visible network model.
• Product Image Optimization: Liferay’s Adaptive Media technology ensures that the dimensions of your product images remain flexible and can adjust to fit any device, maintaining their visual appeal and impact.

Access to low-code and no-code capabilities

Low-code and no-code capabilities of Liferay’s Digital Experience Platform provide a visual interface to automate processes, making it easier to build applications without writing a lot of code. In other words, it allows even non-technical users to create digital experiences through drag-and-drop interfaces and pre-built templates.

• Adaptive Media: Automatically select the most appropriate image size based on the viewport width in Content and Display Pages, including background images and fragment images. It also allows content authors to manually override the selection if necessary.
• Collection Display: Improve performance and user experience with Pagination, giving you the liberty to filter, search, and sort content as per your need.
• Collection Providers: Page Builders and Site Administrators will have access to filtering configuration, enabling the reuse of Collection Providers for different scenarios. You can also develop Collection Providers for sub-types of objects.
• Forms: Forms now accept Boolean and Search Location fields. Get access to more properties with Confirmation Field for Text Fields, Masks for Numeric Fields, Validation for Date Fields, and the Hidden fields.
• Related Items Providers: Display a list of interrelated items based on criteria such as Asset Entries or Blog Entries with the same Category, Categories for an Item, and Related Assets. Select Related Item Providers using the Collection Display fragment on display pages for assets, within collections of categories, and more.
• Site Navigation: Site builders can now create sophisticated navigation for content-heavy sites by creating Display Pages for Categories, adding them as Navigation Menu items, and using the Dropdown fragment to build mega-menus without custom theme development.
• Liferay Objects: Non-developers can create custom business objects through the UI with a low-code approach. The data model and custom layouts can be defined, and objects can have relationships with other objects, including system objects like User. Objects are deployed as administration widgets and Liferay forms can be mapped onto them. Object entries can be displayed as collections and individual details through Display Pages. New headless APIs, search functionality, and integration with other Liferay frameworks such as Workflow, Permissions, and Asset are also provided for advanced capabilities.

Affordable plans to launch and maintain digital experiences

Whether planning for a new digital experience or maintaining a current one, Liferay DXP 7.4 offers an integrated suite of solutions that can help businesses quickly build, launch, and maintain digital experiences on a range of devices, from websites to mobile apps. Get cost-effective plans to deliver personalization, content management, and more features for enhanced user experience.

• Asset Libraries: Use Asset Libraries to store reusable content and create visually appealing Display Page Templates for web and document types. The Staging feature reduces the effort and costs of organizing content for multiple sites with isolated data.
• Documents and Media: Directly embed YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and Twitch videos in Documents and Media, accessible as native documents by linking video links to a new document type. Manage document Filenames and titles separately for greater flexibility. Set expiration dates on documents, like Web Content, to prevent temporary publication issues.
• Forms, Web Content, Documents and Media: Forms, Web Content, and Documents and Media now share a unified user experience for defining new Forms, Structures, and Types and creating new entries.
• Item Selector: Streamline the process of uploading documents during content creation with Folder creation in Documents and Media.
• JS Dependency Declaration: Create projects for the Liferay version by specifying the target platform, aligning with Java development.
• Liferay Enterprise Search: Customers need Liferay Enterprise Search (LES) subscription to gain access to LES features and support.
• Publications: With the new feature, users will have the ability to extend invitations to their colleagues to become part of a publication as viewers, editors, or publishers. Furthermore, they can work together by exchanging comments within the publication.
• Search Re-indexing: System admins can restrict the scope of Reindex actions to specific Virtual instances.
• Site Templates: It is a new feature added for better performance and flexibility. Partial Propagation only exports changed pages, saving time and resources. Propagation Exports are cached for efficient reuse and can be temporarily disabled during Template Changes and then re-enabled for site updates. This offers greater control and ease of use.
• Staging: The feature got an upgrade with System Level configuration options that helps to control whether Parent pages are published with a published page and whether Asset Links are published with no selected content. The former helps when changes to Parent pages are not ready while disabling the latter reduces data exported, improving performance.
• Theme Architecture: Improve page load performance by minimizing the CSS loaded per page. Additionally, theme changes no longer affect admin-only interfaces, simplifying custom theme development.
• Translation: Translate inline content on Content Pages and Web Content Articles automatically using ML-based Google Cloud Translation. The tool enables easier progress tracking and improvements to the language selector UI.
• Video and Audio Preview: The open-source library, Xuggler, which was used to generate audio and video previews is now replaced with ffmpeg.

Create a foundation for your interconnected enterprise landscape

Get a unified, centralized solution for creating and managing digital experiences across multiple touchpoints with Liferay DXP 7.4.

• Accounts: Liferay has expanded the availability of Accounts, which were previously only accessible to users of Liferay Commerce. The feature allows businesses to deliver personalized customer service in all B2B setups. Administrators can now set up the relationships between companies, employees, and their responsibilities, enabling transactions, including purchasing goods and services. They can also store important information that supports these interactions, such as Tax IDs, billing and shipping addresses, and organizational structures to ensure smooth and efficient customer interactions.
• Audit: Audit information can now be included in system logs through a new System Property, allowing administrators to trace which request or instance the audit output belongs to. The x-request-id in the response header can also be viewed using the browser Network tool for a complete view of the request life cycle.
• Click-to-Chat: A subscription-based feature that allows easy integration with Click-to-Chat platforms, enabling site users to chat with customer service operators at their convenience. Supported providers include Chatwoot, Crisp, Hubspot, JivoChat, LiveChat, LivePerson, Smartsupp, Tawk.to, Tidio, and Zendesk.
• Headless APIs: Introduction to RESTful web services for managing Users, User Groups, Organizations, Roles, and Accounts, including the ability to assign Roles to Users and set permissions. The service provides access to Pages, Fragments, and Page Experiences. Liferay also added new endpoints to display language selectors, manage content, document permissions, retrieve all versions of structured content, and create structured content as drafts. These endpoints can be used in custom administration apps to automate permissions changes and provide a comprehensive view of content, making it easier to manage and maintain your website.
• Multi-factor Authentication: Extended support for FIDO2 devices, authenticating users for online services using their fingerprint readers or cameras on mobile or desktop devices, or with dedicated FIDO2 security keys. The result is a simple and secure way to access online services.
• OAuth 2 Administration: Improved OAuth 2 Application Management allows registered applications to be configured as trusted, eliminating the need for manual authorization. The “Remember Device” feature enables administrators to remember user devices, which is useful for single-page applications that access features from registered OAuth 2 applications. It can also revoke all existing authorizations of a registered OAuth 2 application with a single click.
• OpenID Connect: Configure OpenID Connect requests through a proxy using System Properties, and get access to improved Token Refresh for renewal of access tokens before they expire.
• Remote Apps: Register remote JavaScript files as Web Components and a new Widget to display the apps as custom elements. This eliminates the need for deployment and allows front-end development to be separate from Liferay while still providing access to its APIs, pages, and more through the JavaScript Client SDK.

Enhance your digital strategy with Liferay DXP 7.4 new features

Liferay DXP 7.4 is an important release for businesses aiming at delivering a high-quality digital experience to their customers. With Liferay DXP 7.4’s new features, you can now build rich digital experience that is easy to use and maintain. It’s time to upgrade and experience enhanced features and functionalities with future-ready improvements.

If you are using Liferay DXP and Service Builder, then you would have come across the situation where the updates to entity does not reflect after the first service build. That is the service builder changes and the schema update reflects fine when the service is build and deployed for the first time in server, the subsequent updates to the service.xml to add new column, update column or data type, increase data length, or delete columns, etc. changes does not reflect or updates the schema when the service is build subsequently.

To resolve this some of you would have tried different manual steps like, deleting entries for your service directly from servicecomponent and release_ tables in database, undeploy the service module, or even drop the entity schema and then deploy the service again to overcome the issue.  This might not be an good option to try in the production. So, what is the correct way to approach this situation?

This blog is intended to help and share with others, facing similar challenges on how they can handle this through service builder upgrade process.

Service Builder Upgrade Process

Service Builder is a model-driven code generation tool built by Liferay that allows developers to define custom object models called entities. Service Builder generates a service layer through object-relational mapping (ORM) technology that provides a clean separation between your object model and code for the underlying database. At a brief there are following key steps that we perform,

1. Create a Service builder module
2. Create an Service Builder Entity Like Employee
3. Build Service and Deploy

When we are changing the entities in service.xml and rebuild services, ServiceBuilder will update the SQL files used to create the tables, indices, etc. When you deploy the service the first time, ServiceBuilder will identify the initial deployment and will use the SQL files to create the entities and it will create the table in database.

But there are some cases where we need to update existing service builder entity in service.xml, like adding new column, changing column type, increasing column length, deleting column. In these cases, we can easily update in service.xml file and build service and deploy. But it will not update the table, for that we need to write an upgrade process for service builder.

Lets take an example by adding new column.

Adding New Column

1. To add new column Like “Address” in existing service builder entity first update the new column name in service.xml and build the service.
2. Create class “UpgradeEmployee.java” (You can give any name), extend the Liferay Upgrade Process and override doUpgrade method.

   public class UpgradeEmployee extends UpgradeProcess {

   private static final Log log = LogFactoryUtil.getLog(UpgradeEmployee.class);

   private static final String EMPLOYEE_NEW_COLUMN_NAME_ADDRESS = “address”;

   @Override
   protected void doUpgrade() throws Exception {
   log.info(“>>>>>> UPGRADE PROCESS FOR SERVICE BUILDER : START >>>>>>>”);

   /**
   * First Parameter Table Name
   * Second Parameter New Column Name
   */
   boolean isAddressColumnExist = hasColumn(EmployeeImpl.TABLE_NAME, EMPLOYEE_NEW_COLUMN_NAME_ADDRESS);
   log.info(“is Address Column Exist: ” + isAddressColumnExist);
   if (!isAddressColumnExist) {
   String addressColumnType = “STRING”;
   alter(EmployeeImpl.class, new AlterTableAddColumn(EMPLOYEE_NEW_COLUMN_NAME_ADDRESS + StringPool.SPACE + addressColumnType));
   }

   log.info(“>>>>>> UPGRADE PROCESS FOR SERVICE BUILDER : END >>>>>>>”);
   }
   }

3. Add below dependency in service module build.gradle file

   compileOnly group: ‘com.liferay’, name: ‘com.liferay.portal.upgrade.api’

4. Now Register the UpgradeEmployee using UpgradeStepRegistrator for that create “EmployeeServiceUpgrade” and implement the Liferay “UpgradeStepRegistrator” interface.

   @Component(
   immediate = true,
   service = UpgradeStepRegistrator.class
   )
   public class EmployeeServiceUpgrade implements UpgradeStepRegistrator {

   private static final Log log = LogFactoryUtil.getLog(EmployeeServiceUpgrade.class);
   @Override
   public void register(Registry registry) {
   log.info(“>>>>>>>>>>> Registering Employee Upgrade >>>>>>>>>>>”);
   /*
   * Old Schema Version 1.0.0 which is specified in bnd.bnd
   * New Schema Version 1.0.1
   */
   registry.register(“1.0.0”, “1.0.1”, new UpgradeEmployee());
   }
   }

5. Update new Schema version in bnd.bnd file which we have specified in above class

   Liferay-Require-SchemaVersion: 1.0.1

6. Now deploy the service, the new column should reflect in your database.

Dropping existing Column

1. Remove Column name like “middleName” from Service.xml and build the service.
2. Add below code in doUpgrade Method

   public class UpgradeEmployee extends UpgradeProcess {

   private static final Log log = LogFactoryUtil.getLog(UpgradeEmployee.class);

   private static final String EMPLOYEE_NEW_COLUMN_NAME_ADDRESS = “address”;

   private static final String EMPLOYEE_COLUMN_NAME_MIDDLE_NAME = “middleName”;

   @Override
   protected void doUpgrade() throws Exception {
   log.info(“>>>>>> UPGRADE PROCESS FOR SERVICE BUILDER : START >>>>>>>”);

   /**
   * First Parameter Table Name
   * Second Parameter New Column Name
   */
   boolean isAddressColumnExist = hasColumn(EmployeeImpl.TABLE_NAME, EMPLOYEE_NEW_COLUMN_NAME_ADDRESS);
   log.info(“is Address Column Exist : ” + isAddressColumnExist);
   if(!isAddressColumnExist) {
   String addressColumnType = “VARCHAR(200)”;
   alter(EmployeeImpl.class, new AlterTableAddColumn(EMPLOYEE_NEW_COLUMN_NAME_ADDRESS + StringPool.SPACE + addressColumnType));
   }

   boolean isMiddleNameExist = hasColumn(EmployeeImpl.TABLE_NAME, EMPLOYEE_COLUMN_NAME_MIDDLE_NAME);
   log.info(“is Middle Name Column Exist : ” + isMiddleNameExist);
   if(isMiddleNameExist) {
   alter(EmployeeImpl.class, new AlterTableDropColumn(EMPLOYEE_COLUMN_NAME_MIDDLE_NAME));
   }

   log.info(“>>>>>> UPGRADE PROCESS FOR SERVICE BUILDER : END >>>>>>>”);
   }
   }

3. Update New Schema Version in bnd.bnd and EmployeeServiceUpgrade class.Note: If you have already created EmployeeServiceUpgrade class then do not create again just update schema version
   @Component(
   immediate = true,
   service = UpgradeStepRegistrator.class
   )
   public class EmployeeServiceUpgrade implements UpgradeStepRegistrator {private static final Log log = LogFactoryUtil.getLog(EmployeeServiceUpgrade.class);
   @Override
   public void register(Registry registry) {
   log.info(“>>>>>>>>>>> Registering Employee Upgrade >>>>>>>>>>>”);
   /*
   * Old Schema Version 1.0.1 which is specified in bnd.bnd
   * New Schema Version 1.0.2
   */
   registry.register(“1.0.1”, “1.0.2”, new UpgradeEmployee());
   }
   }
4. Update Liferay-Require-SchemaVersion in bnd.bnd
   Liferay-Require-SchemaVersion: 1.0.2
5. Deploy Service Builder Module
6. Now deploy the service, the existing column should be dropped from your database.

Updating Column Name and Data Size

If you want to change column name “username” to “modifiedBy” with type VARCHAR(100) from VARCHAR(75).

1. Follow the same step as above and add below code in doUpgrade method

   // Change Column Type with Column Name
   boolean isUserNameColumnExist = hasColumn(EmployeeImpl.TABLE_NAME, “userName”);
   log.info(“is UserName Column Exist : ” + isUserNameColumnExist);
   if(isUserNameColumnExist) {
   alter(EmployeeImpl.class, new AlterColumnName(“userName”,”modifiedBy VARCHAR(100)”));

   }

2. Similarly update schema version in bnd.bnd as well as EmployeeServiceUpgrade class.
3. Deploy the service
4. Now deploy the service, the column name and data type update should reflect in your database.

Adding New Entity in Service Builder

Sometime table is not created once service is deployed for that as well, we need to write Upgrade process.

1. Add new Entity Like “LeaveRequest” in existing service builder
2. Build Service.
3. Same as above Create class “UpgradeEmployee.java” extend the Liferay Upgrade Process and override doUpgrade method.

   public class UpgradeEmployee extends UpgradeProcess {
   private static final Log log = LogFactoryUtil.getLog(UpgradeEmployee.class);

   @Override
   protected void doUpgrade() throws Exception {
   log.info(“>>>>>> UPGRADE PROCESS FOR SERVICE BUILDER : START >>>>>>>”);
   boolean isLeaveRequestTableExist = hasTable(LeaveRequestImpl.TABLE_NAME);
   log.info(“is Leave Request Table Exist : ” +  isLeaveRequestTableExist);
   if(!isLeaveRequestTableExist) {
   runSQL(LeaveRequestImpl.TABLE_SQL_CREATE);
   }
   log.info(“>>>>>> UPGRADE PROCESS FOR SERVICE BUILDER : END >>>>>>>”);
   }
   }

4. Now Register the UpgradeEmployee using UpgradeStepRegistrator for that create “EmployeeServiceUpgrade” and implement the Liferay “UpgradeStepRegistrator” interface.(Same as above)Note: If you have already created EmployeeServiceUpgrade class then do not create again just update schema version

   @Component(
   immediate = true,
   service = UpgradeStepRegistrator.class
   )
   public class EmployeeServiceUpgrade implements UpgradeStepRegistrator {

   private static final Log log = LogFactoryUtil.getLog(EmployeeServiceUpgrade.class);
   @Override
   public void register(Registry registry) {
   log.info(“>>>>>>>>>>> Registering Employee Upgrade >>>>>>>>>>>”);
   /*
   * Old Schema Version 1.0.3 which is specified in bnd.bnd
   * New Schema Version 1.0.4
   */
   registry.register(“1.0.3”, “1.0.4“, new UpgradeEmployee());
   }
   }

5. Update new Schema version in bnd.bnd file which we have specified in above class
   Liferay-Require-SchemaVersion: 1.0.4
6. Deploy the service builder module. Table will be created after deploying.
7. Now deploy the service, the new table schema will be created in your database.

Liferay launched its Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to facilitate businesses to upgrade the creation and management of experiences that aids the end-to-end customer relationship. Migration to the Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is one of the most significant moves a business can make when switching from legacy technology. Before starting the upgrade/migration, it’s crucial we make the whole plan for migration. Following the migration, topics are felt in these categories

When mingled with the novel characteristics of modern digital business where customers can have more conversations than ever with companies of their choice, the lack of a supporting platform can be the difference between net new customers or a loss of competitiveness.

1. Prerequisite for migration

Before upgrading to Liferay, make sure you first take care of the following point

1. Make sure that Liferay is patched with the most recent service pack.
2. Create a test environment and use copies of the database and server.
3. Clean unnecessary database data to improve portal performance and make the migration process faster. For pruning, the database perform the following task

a. Removing Duplicate Web Content Structure Field names. Liferay has provided Groovy scripts, i.e., https://portal.liferay.dev/documents/113763090/114000078/NormalizeDuplicateFields-6.2.x.groovy you can run in the script console.
b. Removing Unused Objects

i. Data cleanup – In the Control Panel, navigate to System Settings → Upgrades (in the Platform category) → Data Cleanup. Select the module and execute Data clean up.
ii. Specific objects must be checked, and unused must be removed following are the object types.

1. Instance: Remove unwanted instances as they consume the highest objects in the hierarchy.
2. Sites: Remove an unwanted site. The objects associated with the site will also get removed.
3. Removing Intermediate Journal Article & Documents Versions: when we make any modifications to a journal article, it is saved as a version. We can safely remove old versions of a journal article, and documents that are not required it will free significant space.
4. Users -Remove all inactive users, and it’s related data to optimize the process.
5. Layouts: As layouts associated with pages
6. Unwanted Data: Remove unwanted data like preference, documents, Resource permission, etc.

4. Testing the copy of the database after pruning data.

2. Database migration

In this step, we will migrate our database from Liferay 6.2 to Liferay 7.x

1. As many update statements will be executed during migration, we must tune the database before migration. The following are steps to tune the database.

a. Deactivate the data integrity measure taken by databases as it impacts the performance.
b. Turn off transaction logging as it is not required during upgradation.
c. Increase the interval to flush commits to disk

2. Liferay provides a data migration tool for seamlessly migrating the database using simple steps.
3. For Oracle and postgres Database, add db connector jar file into {liferay.home}/tomcat-9.0.6/lib/ext folder.
4. Before starting the database upgrade process, Create com.liferay.portal.search.configuration.IndexStatusManagerConfiguration.config file and add indexReadOnly property in com.liferay.portal.search.configuration.IndexStatusManagerConfiguration.config file is set to true. (indexReadOnly=”true”)

3. Liferay Code Migration

1. Once the database is migrated you need to upgrade the code to make it compatible with Liferay.
2. Liferay provides a code migration tool in Liferay IDE. You can migrate the code using this tool by following simple steps.

a. Setup Liferay Workspace – Create a Liferay 7.x workspace if you don’t have otherwise import the workspace
b. Liferay Workspace Setting – Download the Liferay 7.x bundle you are upgrading to and convert .cfg files to .config files as they allow specifying a property value’s type and allow multi-valued properties.
c. Fix your upgrade problems:

i. Auto correct your upgrade problems as mention in upgrade tool.
ii. These are some problems that cannot be auto corrected you have to update them manually according to the breaking changes documentation.
iii. Mark your addressed problem resolved and remove the problem marker
iv. Upgrade Service builder and rebuild services to persist update.
v. Upgrade customizes plugins like a hook, fragment, Model Listener, etc.
vi. Upgrade theme, Layout, and templates
vii. Upgrade Ext plugins

3. For JSP hook migration, you need to create a hook module from scratch and override the required jsp.

4. Post Migration Steps

1. Post successful database upgrade change indexReadOnly=”false” in com.liferay.portal.search.configuration.IndexStatusManagerConfiguration.config. Otherwise indexing will won’t work.
2. Regenerate the search index
3. If you are using Liferay DXP, then delete the license folder from {liferay. Home}/data directory.
4. Tune your Liferay server by increasing memory in the setenv.bat/setenv.sh file.
5. Now start the Liferay server and copy the license file to the deploy folder if you are using the Liferay DXP.

5. Common issues/error Occurred after Migration

1. You must first upgrade to Liferay Portal 7XXXX – This error will be shown in logs when you start the Liferay DXP/CE server with a Liferay 6.2 database before the upgrade
2. NullPointerException at ThemeServicePreAction – When you had started the migrated server but the migrated theme is not found at that time, this exception will be seen in logs.
3. PwdEncryptorException: invalid keyLength value – This exception will occur when the specified password-encryption algorithm is incorrect. We need to specify the correct encryption algorithm in portal-ext.properties i.e passwords.encryption.algorithm.legacy=.
4. NullPointerException while upgrading DDM – When there is any orphaned template is there, and you run migration at that time, this exception will occur. To resolve this issue, delete the orphaned template.

As we have seen, it is not difficult to migrate to Liferay we just need to make proper migration plans and execution steps according to our portal.

We facilitate businesses to migrate from propriety legacy, expensive, and inefficient systems with Liferay Portal Migration Services with high-security and minimal downtime. We facilitate up-gradation and migration, leveraging an automated migration toolkit. With our domain expertise, we understand how to assess and document existing processes, dependencies comprehensively, and issues when carrying-out migration plans.

Digital experience platforms are a priority for business leaders who aspire to optimize the customer lifecycle. The challenge is, there are numerous platforms to choose from. According to Forrester, application development and delivery professionals have “a discomfiture of riches” to facilitate them to deliver, manage, and optimize customer experiences. While options are plentiful, budgets are not, as leaders must also pick how to split their priorities between marketing, IT, and business. Nevertheless, an emphasis on a digital experience platform is still needed to improve the customer’s journey.

• 80% of the buying process is predicted to occur without any human interaction by 2020
• Sirius Decisions states that 67% of the buyer’s journey is now accomplished digitally
• 53% of buyers turn to social media in their evaluation of various tools and technologies
• 83% of customers need some customer service while making an online purchase

When mingled with the novel characteristics of modern digital business where customers can have more conversations than ever with companies of their choice, the lack of a supporting platform can be the difference between net new customers or a loss of competitiveness.

Attributes of the Modern Digital Platform – Liferay DXP

The modern digital experience platform is a blend of multiple digital strategies that backs web, social, customer support, email, and other components. Independently, these pieces are expensive and disjointed, eliminating the competencies needed for a robust and rewarding digital experience.

Forrester suggests applying unified platforms presented as an ecosystem of services and solutions that connect people, processes, objectives, strategies, and technologies. An ecosystem facilitates a piece of the customer’s journey but doesn’t necessarily “own” each touchpoint, rather than serving as a collection of puzzle pieces that work as one.

Migration to the Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is one of the most significant moves a business can make when switching from legacy technology. The effort level can vary significantly, from an easy task requiring running an existing plugin to an equally involved and complex development project demanding several staff-hours and resources. The question is: How can businesses know the level of effort required for their migration?

Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Liferay launched its Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to facilitate businesses to upgrade the creation and management of experiences that aids the end-to-end customer relationship. Liferay is noted for its reliable end-to-end performance that has been developed entirely in-house. Some key, high-level differences from prior versions in DXP encompass:

• Modularity

New, modular design enables businesses to design robust, adaptable, lightweight, and innovative systems for the digital world. Liferay’s functionality has been distributed into hundreds of modules, allowing the businesses to utilize only what they require for their project. The unrivaled level of extensibility generates an endless amount of possibilities

• Upgrade Tool

A novel individual upgrade tool dramatically enhances the experience of upgrading Liferay installation to the latest version. Upgrading to DXP is now separated into Core upgrades and Module upgrades, the latter of which can be executed independently. Liferay DXP also has built-in safeguards against any errors that may occur during the upgrade process.

• Single Page Applications

All applications on Liferay DXP are automatically configured as single-page, only loading necessary components. This ends up in reduced bandwidth usage, load times, and rendering time in the browser. Faster loading performance results in higher user retention and satisfaction.

As with any platform, business leaders will always be pushed to upgrade at some point. Let’s see four reasons why an upgrade and migration are in your business’s best interest as it protects and strengthens your digital experience investment.

The effort level can vary significantly, from an easy task requiring running an existing plugin to an equally involved and complex development project demanding several staff-hours and resources. The question is: How can businesses know the level of effort required for their migration?

Why should Enterprise Migrate to Liferay DXP?

Doesn’t matter if the remote work is a longstanding policy or an interim solution, employees require support to flourish. If you are interested in implementing an intranet that optimizes collaboration and performance from any location, reach out to one of our digital workplace experts.

• Improving Customer Journey

Market forces evolve faster than ever, compelling businesses to accelerate their innovation to keep up. Furthermore, the capability to unify operations, marketing, business, and customer service are critical components of every business. Those that upgrade and migrate their Liferay investment accomplish their business operational goals while lowering costs needed to go-to-market, creating much-needed business agility.

A platform migration adds the following capabilities:

• Execution of Digital Strategy: At the heart of fast-tracked business results is fair process. Upgrading your investment in Liferay DXP offers businesses the ability to create and manage modular business processes, flexible workflow tools, and a scalable platform to meet evolving customer demand.
• Audience Targeting and Management: With so much noise online, businesses want to reach the right customers with the right message. Liferay DXP has modernized audience targeting, enabling the creation of visitor segments based on metadata, including user profile custom fields, user language, IP address, sign-up date, and last login date. On the back end, businesses can utilize this data to generate reports for segments and campaigns, develop loyalty programs, offer customer onboarding, and filter out users.
• Site Content Sharing: Liferay DXP can share different content pieces between child and parent sites. Being able to inherit content smoothly eases the burden of content creation.
• Easy Content Creation: Authors now have access at any time to Liferay’s powerful authoring applications thanks to AlloyEditor, a visual content creation tool created with React.JS. The authoring application enables easy uploading of media content, an inline image editor, geolocation of web content, and multi-step staging for content review before publishing. AlloyEditor is also in Liferay DXP’s blogging application.

Integration with Employees and Partners: Employee advocacy is the new key to business success, having grown more than 200% since 2013, according to the Altimeter Group. Additionally, socially engaged employees are 27% more likely to feel optimistic about their business’s future and survival. Investing in Liferay DXP provides the advocacy platform to contribute to great internal and external community experiences.

• Effortless Asset Integration

Migrating to Liferay DXP offers businesses a blend of both fronts- and back-end solutions that negate the need to purchase a third-party system. Migrating to Liferay DXP involves the following benefits:

• Integrated Digital Assets and Social Content: Liferay DXP involves support for common enterprise digital assets, eliminating the need to buy third-party systems. The platform facilitates a full document management system (DMS), including integration with SharePoint and Documentum, asset management for videos and images, and blogs, wikis, knowledge base tools, and forums.
• Service-oriented Architecture (SOA): Business processes and businesses are complex, demanding that many pieces work in unison. Liferay DXP brings in an open SOA framework that enables the integration of existing HR, accounting, or sales systems that unify data for a complete organizational snapshot. Accessibility is further achieved through Liferay’s single sign-on (SSO) support.
• Modern Experience: Web platforms must embrace smartphones becoming the device of choice for web accessibility for end-users. Liferay has incorporated the ability to build mobile portal platforms, aided with responsive design, push notifications, and pre-built interfaces. The addition of permissions and device sync lets your users access the data they need from their preferred platform.

• Business-ready Forms

Comprehending what your community and website require is fundamental to providing the experience to keep users coming back for more. Migrating to Liferay Portal opens businesses to new support for form creation, enabling advanced data capture while supporting built-in applications and extensions.

• Technical Changes: Because of the new Liferay Forms application, several portlets are shifting from XML data to JSON to reach enhanced flexibility regarding containing additional data that XML could not provide.
• Liferay Forms: Accumulating data is much more dynamic, with complex multicolumn layouts and the capability to span several pages. The new application offers more control over form fields, such as customizing fields or hiding them with visibility expressions.

• Developer Tools

Lastly, we touch on Liferay’s developer capabilities. Liferay DXP comes with several out-of-the-box resources and offers access to a wide variety of developer tools to extend platform capabilities and personalization further. The availability of code-driven and click-driven content building means that everyone can build an engaging digital experience.

• Technical Add-ons: Developers can utilize the Liferay Developer Studio and Liferay Sync to develop personalization’s or manage multiple websites, respectively.
• Blade Command Line Interface (CLI): Developers looking to produce new modules can use the Blade CLI to create new projects usable with any development environment.
• Liferay Workspace: Liferay Workspace is a bespoke environment for modular development to hold and manage Liferay projects. Liferay Workspace is compatible with several development environments, allowing versatility for any team

How Can Businesses Switch From Their Current System to Liferay DXP?

Liferay DXP comprises an open framework and API, which can be utilized to use any data that businesses might have in your existing system. Migrating to Liferay DXP includes migrating your installation and code (your custom apps) to the new version.

Here are the high level steps to migrate to Liferay DXP:

1) Upgrade Development Environment
2) Migrate Plugins SDK Projects
3) Upgrade Build Dependencies
4) Fix Upgrade Problems
5) Upgrade Service Builder Services
6) Upgrade Customization Plugins
7) Upgrade Themes
8) Upgrade Frameworks & Features
9) Upgrade Portlets
10) Upgrade Web Plugins
11) Upgrade Ext Plugins

Way Forward

Exploring all the exciting advantages offered by Liferay DXP, no business can ignore it to create their business portals. One or another day, your business will expand, and you will need a smart and intuitive technology to build or migrate your portal. So, why not migrate to Liferay today and start availing its advantages.

These reasons are enough to explain the significance of the Liferay Digital Experience Platform and might make you migrate to Liferay from other portal technologies. If you are looking for someone to migrate your portal to Liferay, contact us or drop an email at connect@aixtor.com, and one of our agents will shortly get back to you with your queries.

Customer experience has forever been a way for organizations to distinguish themselves. But, COVID-19 has transformed the rules of the game.

The customers are now increasingly self-isolating, prefer digital and contactless engagement mediums, are more mindful about spending, and are expected to be making different lifestyle choices for some time. Curating customer experiences for this new normal may call for essentially different approaches. But the opportunities to develop value are several.

In an age of social distancing, the way organizations interact with customers is evolving. Physical touchpoints are being minimized in favor of no-touch self-service models that are increasingly safer, cost-effective, and efficient. Customer service, today, at every touchpoint, is almost wholly contactless.

In the interim, Asian Paints, India’s largest paint company, takes the self-service route by allowing its dealers to place orders through a self-service web portal.

Does this change to self-service models imply that human-powered customer service will fade? No. Customers still prefer talking to a human-like call center agent while addressing some issues. However, even in call centers, the first layer of communication today is self-service chatbots and portals. These tools empower customers to search for answers and solve routine issues on their own.

With the proliferation of COVID-19, massive transitions in customer expectations have reframed the way organizations engage with devices. Present-day customer is more mobile, digital, and connected than ever before. They want relevant information and functionality wherever they are, on-demand. They also require organizations to help themselves with methods like the ability to view an account, pay a bill, or schedule an appointment in a few clicks.

Self-service mediums like customer portals are a significant part of fostering such an experience in post-COVID 19 worlds. However, not all portals are developed equal. Most conventional portals fail to deliver the modern user experience that today’s customers want.

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59% of customers and 71% of business buyers say self-service availability impacts their loyalty

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Modern Portals Put the Customer First

These same connections also enable agents to provide a more tailored customer experience.

Present-day customer portals are defined by much more than their self-service capacities. Nothing like conventional customer portals built for transactions than fostering relationships – today’s customer portals are connected, personalized, and readily available from any device. They make it hassle-free for customers to search for information, manage accounts, and connects with agents whenever required.

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        68% of service professionals say one bad experience inflicts more damage to a

customer relationship than five years ago.

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The Advantages of Digital Experience

The advantages of a customer portal range across all areas of a business – from customer experience to internal process to technical factors. The portals boost customers at every stage of their customer journey. For instance, when a customer thinks ordering a product, the portal will cater a consistent point of access to look for what they want, buy-in a few clicks, track deliveries, and now even allows viewing restocking dates, warranties, and order history – across multiple devices.

For the business, customer portals deliver more than just customer satisfaction. They also have a built-in capability to amalgamate various systems and data sources to cater to a connected and personalized customer experience. The key to this is a CRM system that enables a single view of the customer.

An entirely integrated portal caters to customer profile information, interests, history, and actions that allow more personalized service. It is demanding for IT departments to maintain and upgrade a legacy portal’s back-end systems. Weighed against their predecessors, modern customer portals are smoother to maintain, upgrade, and integrate with fundamental data sources, business systems, and processes. They also provide a higher level of security via updated capabilities like application monitoring.

Development Priorities For Modern Customer Portals:

It is central to recognize solutions that serve the requirements of both the customer and the business. The ideal solution must cater to a seamless service experience for customers and grown efficiencies across business units.

• • Unify Data and Processes from Any System

Customers anticipate feeling like they are dealing with a single business, not a series of    disconnected parts. Amalgamating business’s service and business processes through knowledge articles, live-agent chats, and third-party systems develop unified customer experience. For the business, a seamless capture of portal activities caters to a holistic view of the customer for agents. For the customer, this ends up in a better experience.

• •  Provide Personalized Engagement

80% of service teams agree that a shared, single view of the customer empowers departments to cater to a more consistent experience across every channel. Connected CRM data boosts businesses to intuitively deliver tailored suggestions, including services, products, and notifications.

• •  Enable Connected Self-Service

81% of customers try to take care of issues themselves before reaching out to a live agent. With the right tactics in place, self-service portals can become the crux of the service process by smartly surfacing the most relevant responses to customer queries without involving agents. In practice,
this method has led to a 31% growth in case deflection and a 22% rise in customer satisfaction.

What’s Next?

A new method of customer success needs investment in an innovative customer portal that is integrated, personalized, and caters seamless self-service. The transactional, conventional portals of the past no longer meet the expectations of present-day connected customers. With a combination of innovative solutions and smart design tools, customer portals are not the only turnkey to develop, but also meets the needs of customers, businesses, and IT departments alike.