University’s Self-Service Portal Gives 40,000 Users Easy Access to Important Resources
Key Takeaways
- Equip your content managers of all skill levels.
With Liferay’s straightforward content capabilities, hundreds of users can create and manage content for a wide variety of audiences. - Create one place for all your users to log in for easy, lower-cost maintenance.
Because the University of Maine System serves all of Maine, the self-service portal is a critical tool to unify students, faculty, and staff. - Provide secure and flexible authentication and authorization options.
Users are able to safely log in once and access only what they need to, including many integrated external platforms and resources via SSO (Single Sign-On.)
Background
Challenges
Because the portal is so crucial to the university for its time and cost-savings, the university’s IT team made it a priority to improve and maintain the solution. As they were thinking of upgrading to Liferay DXP, the University of Maine System outlined goals for their post-upgrade solution:
- Implement a system to support Single Sign-On (SSO).
With users needing to access multiple external resources, sometimes multiple times a day, the team wanted the updated portal to connect users easily and seamlessly. - Provide universities and system offices with a comprehensive content management system.
Hundreds of users needed to inhabit dozens of different, permissions-specific roles to create, edit, and manage personalized content for thousands of end users. - Address existing issues.
The outdated portal had a number of problems, including slow search and a lack of adherence to accessibility standards because of limited platform functionality.
Implementation
With assistance from XTIVIA, a participating partner in the Liferay Partner Program, and Liferay Support, the University of Maine System completed a successful upgrade to Liferay DXP in a little over a year, rolling out their refreshed MyCampus portal to faculty, staff, students earning undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, and alumni. The portal uses a combination of out-of-the box features and customizations to fulfill the team’s vision.
Results
The upgraded MyCampus portal has been able to accomplish some of the team’s key goals with:
- Fast self-service options.
Users can quickly find resources and information on the portal by self-servicing, with enhanced features such as search through Elasticsearch.
Integrating with the authentication system SAML and leveraging SSO, users can navigate to internal and external resources easily, improving their overall experience.
Strong, secure identity management. - Easy and fine-grained content management.
With or without technical ability, users can create, edit, and maintain content for a diverse audience, without seeing anything they shouldn’t.