Recently I had the opportunity to spend couple weeks in Europe. During that trip I spent some time at Liferay office in Germany. It was really nice to see my German collegues and of course enjoy some German wheat beer and Apple Wine which is typical for the region.

I also spent some time in Finland and was able to visit both family and friends. Also had some beer with my few friends from Logica. From Finland I went to Sweden to speak at the very first Liferay Nordic Symposium but before going there I spoke at Warm-up Cruise arranged by Liferay partner Ambientia. Check out Ambientias blog post and my presentation on SAML.  You can also check out my presentation on Liferay Nordic Symposium: Developing Liferay Plugins with Maven.

I can't believe it's already been already 3 years since I left Logica and joined Liferay. Today it's exactly 3 years when I moved from Finland to Germany to join Liferay as a senior consultant. It's been really interesting 3 years. First 18 months I worked from our German office in Frankfurt am Main. My duties were mostly helping our customers and partners with their Liferay architecture and performance tuning. I also did quite a few trainings all over Europe. Although travelling was quite exhausting I still enjoyed it quite a bit.

During my time in Germany I also got to participate in some core engineering tasks in form of sponsored development.  Sponsored development is where a customer comes to us with some feature or enhancements they want in the core product and as a result we find a way to implement the customer needs in such a way that we can include it in the core product for everyone else to take advantage of too. 

When I joined Liferay the intention was that I would join the team in Los Angeles as a core engineer. Well it took some time to get all the paper work done for US immigration and for me to get a H-1B visa but that finally happend about 18 months ago and that's when I relocated to sunny Southern California. Now I live in Los Angeles and work as a core engineer from our LA office. 

It's been amazing 3 years and I'm so proud to be member of our amazing team. It hasn't been without some challenges and frustration (mostly against USCIS) but I think it's all been worth it. This is truly one of the rare companies that care about more than just shareholder profits. It really cares about it's employees, customers and community and not to forget about society in general. One of our perks is that we can get paid days off to participate in volunteer programs. 

If you'd like to join us check out our career pages and feel free to contact me.

My review copy of Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Intranets from Packt Publishing was waiting for me at my desk in June already but haven't had time to go through it until now. Thanks again Packt for providing the opportunity to review their books.

Book details:
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Language: English
Pages: 692
Release date: May 7, 2010
ISBN: 1849510385
ISBN 13: 978-1849510387
Author: Jonas X. Yuan
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.5 inches

This book is an updated version of Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets which was written for Liferay Portal 5.2. The book has been reorganized and has doubled in the number of pages from the first one. This book is targeted to beginners and portal administrators. Notice the difference: Portal administrator is the person responsible of composing the portal pages where as system administrator is responsible of installing, configuring and tuning of the portal. The book introduces you to the terminologi used by Liferay portal as well as to many of the features Liferay has. Overall Jonas has done a good job with the book and it provides you a starting place to learn to use Liferay Portal.

Now if you are looking to become a Liferay expert the fastest route there is through Liferay trainings. Liferay has great trainings that will teach you hands on to use Liferay the way it was intended.

You might also be interested in the authors blog post about the book and my previous book reviews.

I got a little while ago Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets book review copy courtesy of Packt Publishing.

Book details:
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Language: English
Pages: 336
Release date: April 2008
ISBN: 1847192726
ISBN 13: 978-1-847192-72-1
Author: Jonas X. Yuan

The book is targeted to Liferay beginners and "Do-It-Yourselfers" who want to develop a simple but powerful corporate intranet. The book goes thought how to install Liferay and use it's built in portlets quite well. After reading this book you should be able to install Liferay, manage pages, users, groups and roles, create discussion forums and use the Liferay Journal, document library and image gallery for your basic content management needs.

I can recommend this book to anyone who want's to learn how to use Liferay and it's built in portlets. It might also be good reference to administrators on how to do basic tasks in Liferay. It doesn't though offer much to developers already familiar with Liferay but then again that's not it's target audience.

Please be free to give feedback and suggestions since this is my first book review. Also give your opinions on the book if you've read it.

I'm pleased to tell you that my employer Logica Finland has become Liferay Service Partner. This is really important to me since I'm the one that has been pushing Liferay as our preferred portal. This is also good news to Logica customers since now they can buy Liferay support and services from Logica.