Get the most out of Liferay Subscription Services by understanding what is supported.

Subscription Services

1. What is Liferay's Subscription Services?
2. How do I know what is covered and what is not covered under Subscription Services?
3. Is custom development covered under Subscription Services?
4. Are upgrades covered under Subscription Services?
5. Does Subscription Services include assistance in performance tuning Liferay Portal?
6. Can Subscription Services help me with clustering, load balancing, or other high availability configurations I need?
7. What is your mobile support policy for Liferay Portal?
8. Are touchscreen laptops supported?
9. I am trying to use instructions found on Liferay.com and they're not working. Is this officially supported?

Issue Resolution

1. What incidents qualify as Severity 1 "High Priority"?
2. What should I do if I have an incident that needs to be resolved immediately, but Liferay Support needs more time from now?
3. Is there something I can do to speed up resolution times?
4. Why is it so important for you to replicate issues when I can show them to you in my environment?
5. Can Liferay Support resolve my issue on a call or screenshare?
6. What should I do if I cannot reproduce an issue in an uncustomized instance of Liferay?
7. How do I resolve a production down situation?
8. Why do I need to close tickets? Why are the support engineers closing tickets that I haven't confirmed to be resolved?
9. Why is there a limit on reporting only one issue per ticket?

Third Party Technologies

1. What is the extent of support for third party technologies?
2. What third party technologies are supported?
3. What if my production environment went down because of a third party technology or because of a change in our configuration settings?

Service Packs and Patches

1. What is a Service Pack?
2. What is a Fix Pack?
3. What is a Patch?
4. What should I do if I installed a fix and it doesn't work?
5. How do I install fixes?

 

Subscription Services

1. What is Liferay's Subscription Services?

Subscription Services is a combination of your subscription to the Liferay Portal Platform and the services that come with it. With Subscription Services, you can request specific fixes that you need for issues in your project, download the latest fixes for increased stability and have access to Liferay support engineers to assist with your installation and configuration of Liferay Portal.

2. How do I know what is covered and what is not covered under Subscription Services?

The general guideline is that Subscription Services should be viewed as product support. The product is designed with intended functionality and any behaviors or issues that conflict with the intended functionality will be verified and fixed under Subscription Services. The product's intended functionality is documented in the official User Guide.

3. Is custom development covered under Subscription Services?

If there is an issue in Liferay Portal core code that is inhibiting your custom development, then Subscription Services will provide support for these incidents. Please provide clear information on the specific API that is not working correctly and, if available, a small sample of code that triggers the issue. Options for getting assistance for how to implement custom development can be discussed with your Customer Experience Manager.

4. Are upgrades covered under Subscription Services?

As part of your Liferay Enterprise Subscription, you can request assistance during upgrades performed between both minor and major versions. The Liferay Support Team will assist in troubleshooting any Liferay issues and provide solutions in case of a Liferay malfunction.

Before starting an upgrade project, please review the official documentation and Knowledge Base articles on the matter. Since the Liferay Support Team will be able to assist only with Liferay specific issues, please plan sufficient time for updating custom code and testing new features.

5. Does Subscription Services include assistance in performance tuning Liferay Portal?

Performance tuning is an iterative process that includes benchmark requirements gathering, implementation, and testing. If there is a product malfunction that is causing performance issues, you may submit your findings in a support ticket so our Liferay support engineers can reproduce and fix any Liferay related issues or recommend Liferay specific settings that will help you. If you need assistance in executing or setting up performance tuning please contact your Account Representative or Customer Experience Manager.

6. Can Subscription Services help me with clustering, load balancing, or other high availability configurations I need?

There are specific settings in Liferay that need to be configured to allow Liferay Portal to run in a high availability environment which are covered in the official Liferay documentation and Knowledge Base. Our support engineers can provide more information on how to use Liferay-specific settings. However, the rest of the configurations related to your application server, database, web server, load balancer, or other third party technology should be supported by the relative vendor of the third party technology.

7. What is your mobile support policy for Liferay Portal?

Liferay will support access to information (e.g. reading content and navigation through pages) for mobile devices on Liferay Portal 6.2. This includes navigation menus and basic responsiveness of modules.

We support this experience on the Safari and Android mobile browser versions listed in the Compatibility Matrix. We test frequently and verify issues on the following devices:

• iPad (10')
• iPad mini (7')
• Android tablet (10')
• Android tablet (7')
• iPhone 5
• iPhone 4s
• Android Phone (Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4)

Prior to Liferay Portal 6.2, mobile devices are not supported with the exception of Mobile Device Recognition for Portal 6.1. Mobile Device Recognition includes the portal API that ensures responsiveness, provided that the portal is connected to a database of mobile devices.

8. Are touchscreen laptops supported?

Only the non-touchscreen functionalities of the laptop are supported. If there is a user experience or UI issue in Liferay that exists only when using the touchscreen functionality, then these issues are not supported. Please use a mouse to workaround these issues to get the best user experience. Issues that exist when using a mouse are supported.

9. I am trying to use instructions found on Liferay.com and they're not working. Is this officially supported?

Many public blogs and wikis on Liferay.com are created and updated by members of the Liferay community and are not considered official Liferay literature. Liferay employees also use the blogs and wikis to post interesting new features or projects they are working on at a given time for the purpose of helping and informing the community of new developments. However, this content is often times not updated for every version of Liferay and may not work exactly the same way. There is no guarantee that the documentation you see on a blog or wiki will work on the version of Liferay you are using. Our Official Documentation and Knowledge Base are fully supported under Subscription Services. If you need to verify how a particular feature is intended to behave, our support engineers will gladly assist you.

Issue Resolution

1. What incidents qualify as Severity 1 "High Priority"?

The severity level of an incident is based on its business impact. A "High Priority" incident is one where the Incident (i) renders a production system severely impacted or completely shut down, or (ii) causes system operations or mission-critical applications to be inoperable.

Expanding further:

• For an incident to be deemed "High Priority", it must be present on a Production system operating in a Production environment. If the incident is only present on a development or non-production system, it cannot be deemed a "High Priority" severity.
• A "High Priority" incident is an incident that, at minimum, causes a Production system to be "severely impacted". A system is "severely impacted" where it is inoperable, the primary functionality of a Production environment is inoperable, or the system is experiencing security issues that compromise the confidentiality, availability, or integrity of the system's resources. Some examples:
  • Production system crashes because of a Liferay malfunction. A Liferay malfunction, memory leak, or concurrency issue causes the entire site to be very slow, to the point of being unusable.
  • Users cannot sign onto the live site. 80% of the activity of a live site is on the message boards, and for some reason the users cannot access the message boards. Publishing causes a serious performance degradation of the Production system during an extended period of time.
  • A URL allows for phishing or javascript hack. Guest user are allowed to update or delete data they do not have permissions for.

*Please note that "High Priority" level in Help Center, correlates to "Critical" in the Enterprise Services Agreement.

2. What should I do if I have an incident that needs to be resolved immediately, but Liferay Support needs more time?

Please make sure that the Liferay Support Team is aware of the urgency of the issue, so the ticket can be prioritized accordingly. If the proposed resolution time still does not fulfill your project's needs, we advise you to speak to your Customer Experience Manager about other options to expedite the support of your requirements.

3. Is there something I can do to speed up resolution times?

Yes. A majority of the time spent on a given ticket is dedicated towards first trying to reproduce an issue. Delays are usually caused when our support engineers do not have enough information to reproduce issues reported by customers. The ideal situation is when you can reproduce the incident in an uncustomized instance of Liferay and provide those instructions to our support team. This would eliminate the possibility that the issue was caused by custom code or third party technology. During this testing process, you may discover that issues are actually not caused by Liferay Portal, so you would know sooner where to go for a resolution. The faster the issue replication time, the faster the resolution time.

4. Why is it so important for you to replicate issues when I can show them to you in my environment?

Reproducing an issue is the first step to providing a solution. Once we can consistently replicate the issue, we can narrow down the root cause and determine whether it is a product error, a configuration issue or a third party software malfunction. If the issue is determined to be a product error, our support engineers will need to debug the source code on their development environment, which is best done while reproducing the issue. Once a solution is ready, we will conduct tests to ensure that it indeed does fix the reported incident.

5. Can Liferay Support resolve my issue on a call or screenshare?

Liferay Support uses phone calls and virtual meetings in order to gather information about the reported issue. The goal of gathering this information is to reliably reproduce the reported issue and determine the root cause.

Liferay Support does not conduct live troubleshooting sessions with phone calls or virtual meetings.

6. What should I do if I cannot reproduce an issue in an uncustomized instance of Liferay?

You can still report the incident and ask the Liferay Support Team to guide you in reproducing the issue in an uncustomized version of Liferay. In the process you may discover that the issue is actually related to custom code or a third party technology. At times an issue is only reproducible under a certain type of load or other unusual circumstance, in which case you should let the Liferay Support Team know of these details. Your Customer Experience Manager is also a great resource and will be available to assist you with issues that are not included under Subscription Services.

7. How do I resolve a production down situation?

Your Subscription Services includes support for Production down situations that are caused by Liferay product malfunctions. When you contact Liferay Support about this issue, we prioritize getting your production server up and running again. This may require you to use a temporary workaround, restart the servers, or revert recent changes that may have caused the downtime. After the production environment has reached a more stable state, we will work on the long term fix. We will ask you to provide us with a phone number, timezone, and hours of operation to best reach you for a quick contact. When creating the ticket, please refer to this Knowledge Base article for the information that Liferay Support will need to address the issue: High Priority Issue Checklist.

8. Why do I need to close tickets? Why are the support engineers closing tickets that I haven't confirmed to be resolved?

The primary reason for closing tickets when they are resolved is to preserve organization and prevent miscommunication. Two of the most common situations are:

• If we do not receive information needed to continue working on an issue, and you have not updated the ticket for an extended period of time, we will close the ticket with the "Pending Customer" resolution type. This will keep the ticket in the customer's queue for future reference and updates.
• If the ticket was reported for multiple incidents or questions, we will open new tickets for each separate incident and continue by handling one issue per ticket.

9. Why is there a limit on reporting only one issue per ticket?

Help Center is intended to serve as a centralized issue tracking system where you can report issues, monitor progress, and confirm solutions proposed by Liferay Support. We desire to limit the scope of each ticket to a single issue which will help ensure the following:

• A clear definition of a ticket lifecycle so you and Liferay Support can effectively track the ticket progression from initial diagnosis to resolution.
  • By limiting one issue per ticket, we can focus our efforts on troubleshooting the issue more extensively with the goal of delivering a solution to you as soon as possible. If multiple issues were reported on a single ticket, it would be challenging for all parties involved to clearly communicate when each issue was properly diagnosed and resolved, thus extending the overall time spent on a ticket.
• An organized list of tickets that helps you and Liferay Support easily reference previously reported incidents specific to your project.
  • In some instances, you may want to reference a previous ticket for helpful suggestions or documentation links that were posted by Liferay Support. You may also encounter a recurring issue in your project that is the same or similar to one that was reported before. By limiting one issue per ticket, you will find that your ticket history can act as a private knowledge base where you can locate valuable information in an organized repository.

Third Party Technologies

1. What is the extent of support for third party technologies?

The functionality of the Liferay Portal product, as documented in our official User Guide, is supported one hundred percent. If a functionality is showing conflicting behavior, then it is our responsibility to restore the functionality as it was originally designed.

The functionality of some features are made possible through third party technologies. A third party technology is a product created and supported by a vendor other than Liferay. If this type of functionality is showing conflicting behavior, then it's important to find the root cause of the conflict.

If you experience an unwanted behavior related to a third party technology that is shipped with Liferay EE products, we ask that you diagnose whether the issue is due to Liferay or the third party technology. Our team will assist in verifying your diagnosis. As a policy, Liferay does not support the third party technologies that are used to create the feature. However, if an issue is ultimately determined to directly impact the functionality of a Liferay feature, we will provide support and help to ensure the feature is operating as intended.

Here are a few statements that exemplify how we support third party technologies:

• We support the implementation between Liferay and JSR-286 by including all the required features of the specification. Some of the implementation may or may not include some optional portions of the specification since they are just that: optional and up to vendor interpretation. If there is a request to include or fix an optional component that has not yet been included in Liferay Portal, these would be regarded as product enhancement requests rather than a support request. However, if a required feature of the specification is not working as intended, we would support that by fixing the behavior within Liferay or by implementing a fix provided by JSR-286 vendor support.
• Liferay has included CKEditor out of the box in order to provide a rich text editor for a variety of portlets like web content, wikis or message boards. If any CKEditor issue affects portal users' ability to edit text in these portlets, the support team may fix the issue by patching the CKEditor's source code, by upgrading to a newer CKEditor version, or by providing a different rich text editor.

2. What third party technologies are supported?

Liferay Support is primarily responsible for Liferay API. We will ensure that Liferay API is functional and that it meets the required specifications for implementation with Liferay Portal third party libraries provided out-of-the-box. Here you can find a list of the third party libraries.

Along with the third party libraries referenced above, Liferay EE also certifies and supports integration with a number of other third party technologies that follows a set of protocols and standards. For a list of configurations compatible for deployment, you can download a Compatibility Matrix from the Admin Guide under the Supported Technologies category.

If you encounter a configuration issue with a third party technology listed in the Compatibility Matrix, we will help diagnose the root cause and determine if it is due to the implementation of the standard protocol or the third party technology itself. In the case that an issue is found in the Liferay API, we will update the portal to meet our standard technical specifications. If we discover that an issue is caused by the third party technology, we will direct you to the appropriate third-party technology provider so they can update their software to comply with our standard protocol.

3. What if my production environment went down because of a third party technology or because of a configuration setting that needs to be reconfigured?

You should contact the third party technology's services since these are not related to Liferay's core product. You can also contact your Account Representative or Customer Experience Manager to see if there are any other options available.

Service Packs and Patches

1. What is a Service Pack?

Service Packs are minor updates to specific EE versions that include bug fixes, security improvements, and critical performance enhancements, as an effort towards improving the stability of Liferay Portal.

If any database or API changes are implemented, it is because these changes were required for bug fixes or critical improvements (performance/security related improvements).

2. What is a Fix Pack?

Fix packs are a small number of fixes that help to address issues for Liferay Portal 6.0 EE SP2 and above. Fix packs are released every several weeks, based on the fix pack team's discretion for Liferay's Enterprise Edition customers to download and install. Fix Packs allow you to update your product more quickly as opposed to waiting for a new Service Pack release.

3. What is a Patch?

A patch may be given to you as a short term fix for an issue that you have reported. The patch will come in the form of a .jar file that you will place into the application server's classpath, in a .zip file that is installed through the patching tool, or in the form of a Liferay Hook that can be hot deployed. The patch does not represent the long term fix for the product defect, instead the long term fix will be incorporated into the next fix pack or service pack for your currently used Liferay EE version or in the next version of Liferay Portal EE. The next time you apply a service pack with the long term fix built in, you would be able to remove the temporary hotfix.

4. What should I do if I installed a fix and it doesn't work?

A possibility of why this is occuring is that the patch is in conflict with your custom code. Please follow the instructions in this Knowledge Base article to identify and resolve the conflict: Checking for Collisions Before Installing a Hotfix.

It is also a possibility that the patch might conflict with another patch that we have provided to you previously. In this case, please provide the list of installed fixes to Liferay Support so we can provide an updated patch.

A third possibility is that your classloader is configured in a way where the patches are not being read properly. In any of these three cases, please provide details in a ticket so we can help resolve the issue immediately.

5. How do I install fixes?

Starting from Liferay Portal 6.0 SP2, all of the fixes above (Service Packs, Fix Packs and Patches) can be installed using the Patching Tool. Please read this Knowledge Base article to learn more on how to use the Patching Tool: Installing Fix Packs and Hotfixes on Liferay Portal 6.x EE. In order to be notified of new Patching Tool releases, please subscribe to the Help Center Announcements.