Who are you (company) and how long have you been around?
- Enterprise Know How AG®, Zürcherstrasse 22, CH-8853 Lachen founded 2007
- Portal Server Platform provider: Liferay Inc.® US founded 2004 (Open Source since 2000)
What does your product do?
Enterprise Know How AG provides Social Business plug in applications (portlet sets) for mid & large size enterprises and worldwide organizations based on Liferay’s leading Java based open source portal. We facilitate the rapid implementation and Enterprise 2.0 adoption for consumer oriented horizontal B2x portals for desktop and mobile use. Internal and external efficiency, innovation and growth of turnover & net earnings are the main drivers. Earlier implementation is achieved by first interfacing to existing HR Employee and Line organization structures before users of an enterprise can build their flat communities that usually predominate in social business systems.
Mottos:
-> Integrate Social Media Content, Applications and Processes in your Single Sign On E2.0 Portal!
-> Discover and benefit from the knowledge potential of employees, partners and clients!
-> Launch the exponential power of focus and target oriented participative collaboration!
Product components:
All is One 2.0 integrates
Social Business portlet sets
Who is Who 2.0 User oriented Communication like Profile, Blog, Role, Biography, Special personal interest
Yes we Know 2.0 Team and Organization oriented Collaboration like Org Chart, Wiki, Events, Documents, Video Conference
and WCMS, BPM and legacy or Web Applications in consumerized portal environments:
B2C for Clients in Internet
B2B for Partners in Extranets
B2E for Employees in Intranet
in one single or several instances of industry leading ® Liferay JEE Open Source Portal.
What makes you unique in this industry that I am not able to get with other vendors?
®Enterprise Know How Products are, in addition to Liferay, unique by:
Common strategy for all portals meaning that an employee, e.g. relationship manager, is registered
once within a secure high granularity social network having access rights/roles in one or several
internal and external portals and different dimensions with traditional organization structures and
flat communities.
This is provided by an enhancement of the user/organization standard data model of Liferay
allowing Portal Sites B2x, multidimensional organization structures like Line Organization,
Project Matrix Structures in B2E, regional and client segmentation structures in B2C as examples.
Large enterprises can therefore build up their current hierarchies and complex working environments
before customizing and consumerizing temporary task forces or overlapping focus oriented interest
communities.
Roles of members/users can therefore be defined by portal, dimension, organization, community
or single user if less complexity is required.
Quick start by migration of existing employee records and line management structures of the enterprise to achieve social business benefits within current working environments to facilitate the necessary cultural change for building flat communities step by step. Digital native’s Web 2.0 practices can therefore be fostered without risking to completely eliminate all successful existing processes.
Multi language capabilities not only for program labels but also for database structures like client specific roles, dimensions and others.
Extensive Social Business features by predefined Enterprise Know How Portlet sets:
- Who is Who 2.0
- Yes we Know 2.0
Search Portlet (User, Organization, Community, Content) with granularity of access rights (limited content of portals, dimensions, organizations, communities with explicit membership) or closed
organizations and communities are considered.
®Liferay is unique by including:
- Content Management System WCMS Platform
- Collaborative Platform
- Social Platform
- Web Platform as horizontal JEE portal provider
This allows integration of today often separately developed CMS based one way publishing Websites, combined information & BPM portals and modern Social business opportunities.
Open Source JEE Liferay standard portlets can be extended by Enterprise Know How portlet sets
or other Liferay Market Place products or may even be used for further in-house JEE development.
So all program source can be acquired and extended without black box dilemma in case of upcoming
additional business requirements.
Liferay is a JEE open source portal server running either on open source or proprietary application
servers like Tomcat/Apache, JBoss, … IBM Websphere, Oracle WebLogic and others on
standard RDMS DBs within JSR-168/286 and other Web Portal and Portlet standards.
Although emerging from Open Source Community Liferay offers today professional support by
Enterprise Edition up to 24/7 services agreement.
Liferay covers combined capabilities of proprietary Microsoft Sharepoint & IBM Websphere …
Gartner
Liferay was named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products!
Liferay Portal was positioned based on its ability to execute and completeness of vision.
Water & Stone
Liferay Portal was named a leading Java CMS.
EContent 100
Since 2006, Liferay Portal has been named to the EContent 100, EContent magazine’s list of the 100 most influential and innovative companies in the digital content industry.
eWeek
“All of the above is true for the open-source Liferay Portal, but its browser-based administration and content creation interface goes much further, providing in-depth interactivity and capabilities that one usually finds only in desktop applications—providing this breadth of capabilities across all current-generation Web browsers.”
InfoWorld
InfoWorld has named Liferay Portal the “Best Open Source Portal” on the market.
“Putting aside other standards, which our four portal finalists all follow, the compelling argument for winner Liferay Portal can be summed up by mentioning usability, architecture, security, integration, and portlets. Liferay’s intuitive user experience, featuring drag-and-drop portlet arrangement and management, is tops.”
Who are your 3 main competitors?
Main Competitors in different areas:
Only WCM:
Adobe, SDL, Sitecore, (Gartner Magic Quadrant)
Only Portal technology for BPM and integrating Apps (horizontal portals)
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle (Liferay is much less expensive but among these market leaders, Gartner MQ)
Only Social Platform:
Microsoft, IBM, Jive (Liferay is among challengers Gartner MQ)
Combination of all of these disciplines: Liferay® & Enterprise Know How® on JEE standards
Which are your existing customers?
Enterprise Know How’s clients (large enterprises, not Liferay):
Credit Suisse
UBS
Deutsche Bank
Marc Rich (today Glencore)
IBM
PWC
Siemens Business Services
Swiss Life
Helsana
Schindler
Kuoni and many others
Liferay’s clients:
Siemens
Societé Générale
Cisco
Sesame Street
Barclays
T Mobile
AutoZone
China Mobile
BASF
GE Capital
Carrefour
Allianz and many others
Is it possible to customize the environment?
Yes, Enterprise Know How products allow customization by
- Flexible configuration of Portal Instances, Portlet selection of Liferay, Enterprise Know How, other Market Place providers
- Site creation, also consumerization by personal/public User/Organization/Community Pages
- Open Java Lib supporting different frameworks like Spring, Struts, Hibernate
- Open frontend Alloy comprising HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript
What do you bring to the table in terms of top benefits versus us simply implementing it ourselves?
Enterprise Know How provides
- predefined portlet sets as features to accelerate your implementation plans.
- experienced Business PM, Business Analysis/Requirement Engineering, JEE architecture, JEE development, frontend experience for desktop and mobile are provided to support your internal workforce during your project lifecycle.
- technical support that will be guaranteed by Liferay Enterprise Edition EE, your local Liferay Partner and Enterprise Know How AG
- an implementation Partner for business projects and change management facilitating the acceptance of E2.0
- common interdisciplinary project organization that involves preferred providers/stakeholders
Are there any differences between hosted and on-premise versions of the software?
- No
- The software, DB, functionality and even deployment are the same for both hosted and on-premise versions.
On Premise version:
Better internally accepted security for Bank, Insurance, pharmaceutical Industry and other sensitive security-oriented sectors
Hosted IaaS/SaaS versions:
We recommend a trusted provider - Liferay’s specialized hosting partners or preferably; Enterprise Know How trusted partners if we should support your development and deployment processes.
Who owns the data we’ll share on the platform, you or us?
- Data is in possession & control of you as software licencing client
- The same is valid for all licenced sources from Liferay and Enterprise Know How
Can we monitor and track usage?
Yes.
Check with Liferay community experiences in different application server environments. You can also investigate in Dynatrace performance measurement tools and expertise for highly scalable app and portal servers monitoring. This can also be integrated in later installed system environment.
How can I get my data out at the end of our relationship?
DB & file system content export
Our product stores data using standard database and file systems. The data can therefore be extracted and exported to other environments using standard utilities.
Customers purchasing Liferay software will benefit from a full enterprise-grade End of Service Life (EOSL) Policy based on their purchased software maintenance and support level. This means Basic Maintenance, Premium Support or Limited Support (see Website Liferay).
What are your best practice approaches to gaining adoption of your product?
We recommend an incremental approach to adoption, for example, implement B2E for internal use and afterwards B2B/B2C. We believe this provides use of best practices.
We recommend implementing selected standard portal/portlets from Liferay and Enterprise Know How initially. Afterwards develop enhancements by customizing content, processes and if necessary source code.
We recommend an agile development process (over Waterfall) but we develop according to the client preference.
We recommend and utilize the following standard methodologies
Organization excellence:.
- CMMI for Services
- CMMI for Development
- ISO 15504 SPICE
Project leadership:
- PMI certified PMP (conventional PM)
- PMI certified PMI-ACP (for agile methods like IID, Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean, DSDM Atern)
Which languages does your product support?
Liferay:
For standard portal/portlet labels > 40 user languages / enterprise languages including Chinese, Japanese
Enterprise Know How: free configuration including additional reference tables like roles, dimensions in B2x portals to be defined in any Liferay user language.
What kind of support can we expect from you after implementing your product in our organization?
Enterprise Know How Support:
We provide experienced Business PM, Business Analysis/Requirement Engineering, JEE architecture, JEE development, frontend experience for desktop and mobile are provided to support your internal workforce during your continuous project lifecycle to consultancy rates.
We provide support during development and implementation. Our aim is to make the client self-sufficient so that they can manage the environment and develop enhancements by themselves. Of course, Enterprise Know How is happy to provide continuing and/or ad hoc support after implementation.
Liferay Support:
Basic Maintenance provides you with maintenance for a Software Product for four (4) years from its First Ship Date (FSD).
You benefit from:
- access to Liferay’s Customer Portal and customer knowledge bases
- access to all of Liferay’s fix packs and consolidated service packs, and security alerts and critical patch updates.
Premium Support provides you with both maintenance and support for a Software Product for four (4) years from its FSD.
You benefit from:
- full technical support with up to 24×7, 365 day service levels
- access to Liferay’s Customer Portal and customer knowledge bases
- access to all of Liferay’s fix packs and consolidated service packs, and
- security alerts and critical patch updates.
Do you have a community of customers that we can participate in to share experiences and approaches?
Both Enterprise Know How and Liferay have community sites for their customers.
Enterprise Know How Communities in B2C portal
For Products:
Main Focus: Improvement of our Enterprise Know How portlet sets with your user experience and proposals.
For Projects:
Best practices and experiences from other members of the community with Liferay and Enterprise Know How products and their implementation.
For Adoption E2.0:
Best practices and experiences from other members of the community focusing on cultural change by digital work environment and less formal and hierarchical leadership adoption of Web 2.0.
You may as well consider to participate in our Blog Forums discussions.
Liferay Communities in B2C portal
You will find Liferay Projects, Community Projects, Community Feature Ideas, Release, Forums,
Blogs, Wiki, User Groups, Special Activities, Upcoming Events and Liferay University.
What is the model for upgrades and releases?
We plan to have yearly releases and follow up migration and adoption of Liferay release cycles. Bug fixes will be supplied as patches when/as required.
What is your pricing model?
Enterprise Know How portlet sets are licenced by user and yearly licence fee or global source transfer agreement for large enterprises.
Enterprise Know How portlet sets development is based on Liferay Portal and therefore also requires
a Liferay licence agreement, so ask for current Liferay CE (Community Edition) or EE (Enterprise Edition) conditions on Liferay Website.
Is there something else you would like our readers to know about you?
We strongly believe that combining Social Business features for open Web 2.0 communities and for organizational E2.0 structures avoids losing important management and collaboration capacities during debates of cultural change. It supports early adoption even in large enterprises.
Who should our readers get in touch with for more information?
www.enterpriseknowhow.ch
www.enterpriseknowhow-blog.com