Intranets have long been at the heart of well-organized and efficiently-run businesses, helping to coordinate and connect employees around the globe with each other and providing tools that aid in everyday work. While helping companies build great intranets has long been a priority for Liferay, continual advancements in our software have been aimed at consistently improving the systems that can be created.

This continues with the launch of Liferay DXP 7.1, with a wide variety of new tools and improvements to pre-existing applications helping to strengthen intranets and what they can provide for companies across all industries. The following features can play critical roles in crafting a strong intranet. For a complete list of what is possible, read the Liferay DXP 7.1 Features Overview.

1. Accurately Adapt with Conditional Rules

While employee intranets are made to support large workforces and supply information to a wide internal audience, employees have varying needs due to their related departments and individual roles. As such, a modern intranet should be able to adapt to and support the unique needs of employees on an individual basis. In Liferay DXP 7.1, businesses can create personalized forms with the power of conditional rules using the Form Rules feature. Conditional rules allow users to introduce dynamic behavior in forms and allow personalization of the questions or fields to show based on user response, helping to shape important internal forms to the wide variety of employees found within an organization. A predefined set of form rules allows for quick customizations to fields, including enabling fields/options, autofill selects, show and hide, conditional success pages and an API to create and execute new customized rules for your form needs. The Liferay DXP 7.1 Form Builder provides an intuitive and simple user interface with a drag-and-drop interface that cuts down on time needed for creation and reuse.

2. Protect Your Team with Enhanced Data

Protection Companies may choose to include sensitive data regarding their business processes, employees, target customers and more within their intranet-connected databases to better equip their departments. However, the presence of such information means that security is a higher priority than ever. Data protection tools in Liferay DXP 7.1 help companies address GDPR regulations and maintain control over how their intranet manages user data. Capabilities include erasing and exporting a user’s personal data in a machine-readable format upon request. For data erasure, administrators can review content that potentially contains personal information and edit or delete as needed through a simple interface. Liferay DXP 7.1 follows the OWASP Top 10 and the CWE/SANS Top 25 guidelines and supports government-grade encryption, pluggable authentication, LDAP authentication, email verification, session management and OAuth 2.

3. Improve Productivity with Overhauled Workflow Management

According to the McKinsey Institute, productivity improves by 20-25% in organizations whose employees are well connected. Creating workflows in an employee intranet can have a positive effect on workforce efficiency, with all involved parties able to more effectively use their time and skills in a project. Workflow management has received a complete UI overhaul in Liferay DXP 7.1, with all configuration consolidated under one area in the Control Panel. Existing workflows can now be duplicated and definitions are versioned, with the option to save drafts and restore previous versions. In addition, workflows can be incorporated into custom apps for a better end user experience and improved employee efficiency. Workflows allow a user to define any number of simple to complex business processes/workflows, deploy them and manage them through a web interface. In addition, the graphical workflow designer provides a point and click interface to create workflows. Together, this workflow control can better connect employees and improve overall productivity.

4. Develop UI for Great Experiences

Liferay DXP simplifies the development of user interfaces that integrate all enterprise systems into one interface for end users, notably for experiences like an intranet that requires a workflow approval process. Liferay DXP provides a presentation layer for integrating all enterprise systems into a single easy-to-use interface for end users. Liferay supports modern UI frameworks and Single Page Applications (SPAs), which helps provides dynamic and responsive web experiences by taking only the parts of a page that need to be loaded rather than reloading the entire page.

5. Scale According to Your Changing Needs

Businesses can grow rapidly and a strong intranet must be ready to accommodate an expanding and increasingly diversified employee user base. Liferay DXP 7.1 offers high availability and scalability as an infrastructure portal, which has also been deployed in large installations with millions of active users in the most demanding environments. Liferay DXP is highly scalable and has been certified to work seamlessly with data grid products for scalable caches. Additionally, customers can feel secure in deploying Liferay to cloud-based environments, with past deployments using private clouds built on top of VMWare, Xen and KVM technologies, as well as public cloud infrastructures like Amazon EC2.

6. Audit and Optimize for Continual Portal Refinement

Better understanding how employees are using an intranet is the key to continuously improving its features and overall usefulness. However, according to IABC research, 60% of businesses are not measuring their internal communications. Liferay DXP 7.1 gives administrators access to key performance statistics, including hits per page, average time per hit and max time per request, for all applications and pages to help monitor performance and optimize resources. In addition, auditing allows administrators to track and manage user activity within the intranet, including the interactions of targeted user segments with content to optimize its delivery.