Company Profile
Walden Media is a film, television, and theatre production company whose driving passion is “to make movies that are inherently educational." They are best known for their successful 2005 adaptation of C.S. Lewis'
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. The stories they bring to life are drawn from literary classics, recent award-winning novels, and compelling real-life stories. These stories are complemented by activity guides, enhanced DVDs, field trips, special events, teacher seminars, and forums developed to enhance the educational experiences. Ultimately, these productions instill students with a lifelong enthusiasm for learning.
Challenge
Walden Media wanted to spur growth in their already burgeoning online community of educators by offering them a broad set of personalized collaboration tools that would allow them to share ideas and inspirations with each other. Walden Media also wanted to strategically draw new users to the community by seamlessly integrating these tools with an attractive Flash-integrated public web site. The company further required that this site be easily maintainable by a distributed team of non-technical content authors and editors. Finally, Walden sought to rely on the same solution to provide users within and outside the company with a single interface for using applications across the entire enterprise.
Resolution
Liferay Portal exceeded expectations when called upon to meet Walden Media's three-fold requirements:
- COMMUNITY BUILDING / COLLABORATION
Liferay's extensive array of out-of-the-box portlets enabled Walden Media to immediately offer its members tools to facilitate information exchange, increase productivity, and simplify information access. In addition, the time required for creating custom portlet applications was minimized due to Liferay's artfully engineered architecture and flexible design, as well as the development tools that are provided.
- CONTENT CREATION AND MANAGEMENT
Liferay's Content Management System enabled Walden Media's authors to easily add, edit, and manage texts, graphics, and layout of the site. This included content embedded inside the public site's Flash applications. Updateable text was saved via XML file extracts as templates within the CMS and referenced from within Flash via the Journal Portlet. Liferay's standard CMS workflow features (article versioning, approval, and publishing) rounded out the system to make editorial and management processes effortless for Walden.
- INTEGRATION / SINGLE SIGN-ON
Liferay's sound architecture and standards compliance made it the ideal aggregator of both data and applications, even when pitted against leading commercial and open source vendors in the extensive portal and content management solutions landscape. Liferay Portal has become the critical component of Walden Media's Service Oriented Architecture strategy as the company continues to leverage the portal to enable enterprise-wide role-based application access for its user community.
