The Autonomous University of Barcelona (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: UAB) has always had a clear commitment to innovation and the e-university, bringing various communication and management tools within reach of the university community.

The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona was already running an intranet set up by GMV and based on Sun Microsystems (Oracle) portal technology. To keep up with the latest breakthroughs and developments it now needed this portal to be renewed, grafting on new information architecture to suit its needs and user-centered services.

UAB proposed to GMV the idea of developing a intranet 2.0, with a new design in keeping with the new devices and resolutions. It would also need to have a powerful search engine and collaborative spaces and communities for all its users (teaching fellows, service personnel and students) plus a single entrance point for all services and arrangements of the 50,000 or so users.

GMV carried out a market analysis to choose the solutions best suited to UAB’s needs and set up two pilot schemes based on two of these technologies. These two pilots were then put through their paces on an experimental basis (both by IT users and business users from the promotion and communication area) following which the best solution was chosen to meet UAB’s needs. After all this spadework the final choice for developing UAB’s new intranet 2.0 was the Liferay platform.

The system was developed by a mixed GMV-UAB team so that, by the end of the design stage, the university had naturally built up knowledge of how the platform worked and could take over responsibility for subsequent maintenance and development.

GMV and UAB’s professional relationship now dates back to 2004 when GMV set up a contents-management web platform, the intranet and diverse web services and applications. This new development shows that this relationship is still ongoing and forward-looking.