Across industries, portals play a crucial role in maintaining customer relationships for businesses that must supply sensitive, ongoing services and information. From insurance plans to B2B transactions, these secure forms of online customer care continue to provide individualized services and products to a wide audience.

Liferay continues to help businesses around the world create great digital experiences with the release of Liferay DXP 7.1, which includes a variety of new and improved features designed to aid in creating stronger portals than ever. The following features are just some of the tools that can help companies develop the portal that their customers need today. For a complete list, read the Liferay DXP 7.1 Features Overview.

New Form Editing Control

Forms can be an effective way for businesses to communicate with customers through portals, allowing audiences to provide feedback and voice their needs in fast and efficient ways. With Liferay DXP 7.1, forms are more powerful digital business tools than ever. Forms have extensive new functionality, including the ability to dynamically change based on user responses in order to provide deeper insights regarding various target audience groups. This is possible through the ability to create a set of conditional rules that allows companies to design advanced forms for every situation, which will trigger changes to questions when certain conditions, such as user role, are met by the answers provided. The interface has also been improved for better usability, with intuitive editing support, new tools that allow for customization of data collection and new conditional rules for advanced forms.

Improved Data Protection

Portals allow both customers and employees to access crucial information regarding transactions, contracts and various pieces of sensitive information in order to supply effective, fast services. However, the presence of such data means that the modern portal must provide a high level of security and compliance with modern GDPR guidelines. New data protection tools in Liferay DXP 7.1 help companies address GDPR regulations and maintain greater control over how their platform manages user data, including the ability to erase a user’s personal data to comply with these regulations today. In addition, Liferay DXP undergoes continuous security testing and vulnerability monitoring of third-party libraries. When new potential security vulnerabilities are found, customers are provided with a security update or fix pack.

Strong Site Administration

Updates and new features in Liferay DXP 7.1 provide businesses with stronger site administration capabilities, allowing users to fine-tune online portals and effectively respond to user needs. Users can create and manage portals and their respective members, as well as insert JavaScript and metadata, set friendly URLs, create page sets to organize your pages/navigation and more. Users can also create dynamic sites, allowing all changes to the parent template to be inherited by associated children sites.

High Scalability

The size of a business’ customer or partner base when creating a portal may not stay consistent and, in the case of continued growth, may quickly balloon in size. As such, a modern portal must be ready to scale according to changes in the amount of daily users. Liferay portals have been tested to support tens of thousands of simultaneous virtual users and in collaboration use cases on a single application server. Liferay portals have also been deployed in large installations with millions of active users in the most demanding environments. Liferay DXP is highly scalable and customers can feel secure in deploying Liferay to cloud-based environments.

Simplified UI

In order to provide the greatest amount of value to users, portals need to not only provide needed information, but allow fast and simple experiences through an easy-to-use interface. Liferay DXP simplifies the user experience of internal and external portals — notably those that allow users to log in for personalized services or views and those that require a workflow approval process to update content and integrate or aggregate multiple existing services. Liferay DXP provides a presentation layer for integrating all enterprise systems into a single easy-to-use interface for end users.

Dynamic Search

Dynamic, extensible search is built in with Liferay DXP 7.1 through the default use of Elasticsearch to provide powerful search monitoring, tuning and scaling. Liferay provides users with an efficient way to instantly refine search results in a portal by drilling down with specific constraints that match the user’s search criteria with faceted search. As modern portals can play host to web content, documents, images and many more user-generated pieces of content, they can quickly become a massive data repository. As such, multi-tier search is a vital aspect for users, giving them the ability to search across all portal assets available to them based on their roles and memberships.

Detailed Performance Monitoring

Poor portal performance can quickly cause slow loading times and compromised experiences, negatively impacting user opinions and overall portal usage. To help prevent such occurrences, Liferay DXP 7.1 gives administrators the ability to monitor the platform’s performance and better optimize resources with access to key performance statistics for all applications and pages. Meanwhile, the auditing feature allows administrators to track and manage user activity within the platform to better understand their experiences and where changes to a portal can make a difference.

Identity Management

Through logging into a portal, users on both the customer and employee sides are able to access more personalized experiences that provide them with the tools and information they uniquely need. Liferay offers a customizable single sign-on (SSO) that integrates with CAS, LDAP (Active Directory, etc.), NTLM, CA Siteminder, Oracle Access Manager, Novell Identity Manager, OpenSSO and more. These features help businesses shape individual user experiences through detailed identity management.