How can you get more out of your Liferay investment? The key is in understanding common use cases of Liferay and how companies in various industries have applied Liferay DXP to their unique needs and goals.

Recently, Liferay conducted a study of 150 customers from North America through all industries to determine the most common use cases of Liferay to better understand how software is being utilized. According to the study:

• 48% of Liferay customers only use Liferay for 1 use case
• 39% have 2-3 use cases
• 13% have 4-7 use cases

In addition to the number of cases per company, the study also determined the most common types of use cases, which can be seen here:

Inside the Most Popular Liferay Use Cases

The following seven use cases represent the most common applications of Liferay software according to the recent study. These business use cases and their related company-specific case studies can help shed light on the unique ways in which Liferay can be used by companies across many different industries.

1. Digital Workplace

The top use case of Liferay is the creation of productivity-boosting company intranets and collaboration tools in order to create a helpful digital workplace for employees. Within these workplaces, companies can apply automation that brings manual processes into the digital age, which can improve the speed and effectiveness of employee tasks. All of these aspects can help create a customer-centric workplace by helping a company’s workforce better understand and help consumers.

Related Case Study: Coach Inc. created CoachWeb to better empower their global workforce. Coach also created a Virtual Merchandising app to help corporate employees and ensure retail displays are set up correctly, moving past their massive, physical mail coordination.

2. Extranets

Company extranets are designed to be portals for suppliers, partners, vendors and more. With many different portal users, businesses often have many requirements for their extranet, including integration with marketing, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning for inventory and more. The common goal for extranets is to provide continuity in customer experience, even when working through a third party.

Related Case Study: Volkswagen Group in France, responsible for Volkswagen, Volkswagen Utility Vehicles, Audi, Seat and Skoda, created a portal with five sites dedicated to each brand. This improved coordination with other dealerships, workshops and more.

3. Self-Service Customer Portals

Portals can be designed to specifically provide self-service support for customers. including adding services, downloading documents, resolving issues and getting things done faster without having to call someone or go in-store. By providing these self-service capabilities, businesses can reduce operational costs and improve support for employees. Overall, these self-service portals can make customers happy with faster resolutions.

Related Case Study: Suez Environment, a global resource management company, needed to meet the needs of their many business customers and residential customers in Australia. Their customer self-service portal helped customers schedule services, access information and receive more cleanup care. This helped make service more effective for customers and more cost efficient for Suez.

4. Public Websites

Liferay is not only used to create user-specific portals, but is frequently used to create websites for the public, often with anonymous users. Liferay customers usually have the need to include authentications, personalizations and integrations within their sites, balancing form with function. Customers are creating beautiful, engaging websites built on Liferay that catch the attention of visitors and provide great user experiences.

Related Case Study: Banyan Tree is creating a beautiful site that reflects the beauty of their properties around the world, catching the attentions of audiences as soon as they land on a page.

5. Integration Platforms

Integration platforms allow businesses to connect various existing systems and unify the data and processes related to these applications in a single place. In addition, these platforms can be served to customers on their touchpoint of choice in order to expand audience reach. In using them, platforms extend the value of legacy systems by leveraging their data and insights to a greater degree than previously possible and helping them sit alongside newer systems.

Related Case Study: QAD, a leading provider of enterprise software and services, wanted to evolve their infrastructure to be an integrated platform that would connect all their sites, including a public website, intranet, and external user community. So they leveraged Liferay DXP to bring it all together. 

6. Campus Portals

Schools have created unified and personalized sites for many audiences and/or many campuses. In doing so, these portals can be great for providing sites specified for each type of audience as well as for providing unified access to various systems and data sources. This is a frequent use case for education customers of Liferay. The audience within educational institutions can span from applicants to students to administration to faculty to alumni. As such, they need to meet many different needs.

Related Case Study: The University of Maine System created UMS, which services more than 40,000 students around the state and replaced their old user platform. Liferay provided modern software, stability and enterprise-level support that serves multiple campuses. Each campus has a portal within the larger system, each with unique branding. Students and faculty were given their own logins while the appropriate administration accesses a broader system to cover all campuses.

7. Learning Management Systems

Learning applications help instructors deliver educational materials, track student progress and report successful course completion. These systems should also be engaging, relevant at the right time and the right place, and fun through gamification. Successful learning management systems can be used in a wide variety of ways, including quickly training employees, customers, partners, students and just about any audience whose competencies need to be tracked.

Related Case Study: Medical device company Smith & Nephew designed S2 Procedure Performance to move past older and slower approaches to surgical training. The solution integrated Valamis, a learning management system (LMS) add-on available through Liferay that leveraged Valamis’ advanced learning management and Liferay’s user management and content targeting capabilities. The application provides pre-built inventories regarding various procedures, the ability to review and customize needed instruments for an operation, and nurse review of what the surgeon wants beforehand and recordings of previous procedures. In addition, step-by-step procedure overviews can be brought into the OR on a tablet and tutorials and tests for staff can also be created for proper training and preparedness.

Learn more about Valamis and learning platforms here - Why Digital Leaders Should Care About AI in Learning.