Ivy League Portal Comparison
Challenge
Selecting a platform upon which to develop your campus infrastructure is no easy task. Our customer wanted to create a centralized, digital “hub” as the starting point for their online services. Through an internal evaluation process, portal platforms were compared and two finalists were selected. In order to make the final selection, more information was needed. Our customer wanted to gain the first-hand knowledge that comes with implementation and use of each platform.
Our customer envisioned a portal comparison to understand the following:
- Theming and customizable HTML & CSS
- Responsive design and mobile accessibility
- Targeted content by role(s)
- The plugin architecture for custom development
- Communities and social capabilities for blogs, micro-blogging and forums
- Internal and external system integration
- Federated authentication
- Cloud-based hosting
Solutions
Our customer created a judging criteria for the comparison of the two portals. This criteria included a defined set of user stories, an assessment of the system’s user experience and user interface capabilities, as well as integrations with both Salesforce and ServiceNow. The comparison was time-boxed as a six-week effort. At Liferay’s recommendation, sdg was engaged to assist our customer through the evaluation and represent the Liferay implementation team throughout this comparison. Over the course of the project, sdg guided the Liferay implementation development from requirements gathering through implementation and documentation. Additionally, sdg’s experience was leveraged to provide a strategic lens on building an implementation team and understanding the total cost of ownership.
sdg consultants served our customer in the following roles:
- Agile project delivery
- Application architecture and development
- Fully responsive user experience development
- Documentation and training