The University of Maine System Tackles Digital Transformation for 40,000 Students and Faculty

Searching for the Right Platform

The organization decided to reconsider their solution from the ground up. Liferay’s Enterprise Subscription was selected based on its long history as open source software, stability, wide range of features, extensibility and enterprise-level support.

The selection of Liferay’s Enterprise Edition meant the Web Technologies team could hit the ground running, but the project was far from a direct upgrade. The existing portal had a great deal of content and data to be migrated, legacy applications that needed significant updates, customizations that would be critical in the new system, and new user stories to develop. Altogether, it was projected as a 20-month effort within management’s comfort level.

As Liferay Enterprise subscribers, UMS was entitled to Liferay Support. During the project, Liferay engineers helped resolve many issues and assisted with the challenging task of data migration. In the end, the new platform debuted in less than 18 months, at least two months ahead of schedule.

Delivering a Modern Portal for an Ever-Changing Population

In June 2015, UMS performed a massive roll out to their campus audiences. The release featured a statewide implementation embracing the one-university, multi-campus concept. Many centralized services such as IT, HR and Procurement are located in the shared “UMS” site, while the campus-branded intranet sites are where most students, staff and faculty land after login. Other enterprise systems such as the UMS ERP (PeopleSoft) and the learning management system (currently Blackboard) are also centralized.

All campus stakeholders log into a common portal instance, yet remain affiliated with any campus with which they are actively engaged. Admitted and active students, alumni, staff and faculty all benefit from a campus portal that provides timely and relevant information across all channels.

The newly upgraded site utilizes Liferay’s out-of-the-box responsive design features, allowing students and faculty to quickly access their information regardless of location or device. The average page load time has decreased by more than 33%, and their evening usage has seen an increase of mobile device traffic, in just a few months and is continually growing.

New sites are popping up to replace or supplement old programs and increase cost savings. Two examples include the Supervisor Development Institute and Title IX Training projects. They were both able to set up a site and mount all of their training materials online instead of having to pay for massive printed binders.

A Responsive, Omnichannel Multi-Campus Solution

The new site is modernized with greater agility and better usability across multiple channels, and boasts nine new themes and features including:

• Custom plugins that display class and advisee lists to faculty, including student photos, downloadable/printable lists
• Custom LDAP user import and authorization routines
• CAS SSO integration
• Primary campus site landing page configuration and management
• Responsive layout templates
• Category links,a custom portlet with 250+ role-protected, categorized applications links, including SSOs to many conscripted resources

With this new platform in place, built with an eye on their users’ evolving needs, UMS is positioned for success to serve graduating classes many years to come.