Company Profile

EducaMadrid represents the Madrid, Spain school system which accounts for over 500,000 students across 1,600 schools. EducaMadrid is sponsored by the Consejería de Educación de la Comunidad Autonoma de Madrid, an organism of the Spanish public administration.

Challenge

EducaMadrid needed an application which would not only tie together students within a class but also establish relationships between other classes, grades, and even schools. With 500,000 potential users, EducaMadrid required an application that would scale to meet their large user base and best fit their budget. Commercial applications often come with a high price tag along with a per user cost. EducaMadrid needed the following from an application:

• Ability to scale to the total number of users and students.
• Flexible and customizable layouts dependent on the user.
• Community resources accessible to everyone.

Resolution

Germinus, a consulting company located in Spain, selected Liferay Enterprise Portal as the framework application for EducaMadrid. Liferay's framework provided the ability to create an extranet comprised of a set of websites with educative news and contents, as well as an intranet that contained deeply personalizable websites dependent on the hierarchal role of the registered user.

By leveraging Liferay's capabilities, Germinus was able to:

• Implement a Web builder (creation of websites based on portlets)
• Establish virtual communities (group chat, classroom email, etc.)
• Implement LDAP authentication and user management
• Allow content management
• Integrate with MvnForum
• Integrate with legacy applications made with struts
• Develop specific tools: contextual help system, schools management, etc.

With Liferay's robust UI, Germinus was able customize the look and feel of the portal according to the user's hierarchal role and/or grade. Teachers have a "desktop" that displayed classroom materials, and students would see more student oriented UI. As the students progressed to higher grades, the actual interface becomes increasingly more complex (see screen shots).

EducaMadrid saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by implementing Liferay Portal. With each portlet acting like a standalone web application, Liferay provides the means to extend functionality without huge refactoring costs.