Top 3 reasons why Liferay projects fail
I’ve been using Liferay for well over ten years and I’ve seen lots of different ways Liferay projects have been done. There’s been successful projects and then there’s been failed ones. You typically don’t hear about the successful projects but rather the failures but you hardly ever hear why the project failed other than of course that it’s Liferay’s fault. So I wanted to list few of the top reasons in my experience why they fail so that you can avoid them and have higher change of success. These are not really listed in any order of priority but are rather equally important.
1. Team does not embrace or know the Liferay way
If you are not taking full advantage of Liferay features then why are you even using Liferay at all? I see this a lot where people are not willing to commit to Liferay as if you’d be able to just swap it to another product. This leads to having to solve issues that Liferay has already done and provided a nice framework/api to work with. Also in order to take full advantage of Liferay features you need to know about them and that means your team needs to be trained on Liferay.
2. Use of Liferay CE
Liferay is an open source project so why shouldn’t I use CE to do my project? Yes, it is an open source project and that means when you encounter a bug you can either fix it yourself or you can file an issue and hope and pray that someone else fixes it and it makes it to the next release 6 months later. Now if it’s not a clear bug or you can’t produce a clear way of reproducing the unexpected behaviour your issue will most likely not get any attention so you are left with asking help from the forums. Now this is all fine if you have no hurry in getting the project to completion so that would most likely be personal website. Now if you are on a tight deadline and don’t have a capable dedicated team acting as your internal support I’d strongly recommend buying the subscription. Also using CE straight away limits you from staffing your project with the most capable people as Liferay Global Services and Liferay Partners are not allowed to work on projects where CE is used.
3. Use of expert only after there are major issues
This really comes back to reason #1 also but really you should use a real expert on Liferay already in the very beginning before any final decisions are made to audit your architecture and make sure you are fully embracing the Liferay way and your are in the right track to successfully completing the project. Now some will still refuse to hire an expert at this point because one costs too much but if the expert can solve your issue in say 5 days where as your team it might take 30 days was that really all that expensive.
Conclusions
There are many pitfalls with Liferay but having the right people involved in the project from the very beginning will go a long way to making sure the project succeeds.
What are your tips for successful Liferay projects?