Company Profile Goodwill Industries International is one of the world's largest nonprofit providers of education, training, and career services for people with disadvantages, such as welfare dependency, homelessness, lack of education or work experience, and those with physical, mental, and emotional disabilities. Last year, local Goodwills collectively provided employment and training services to more than 720,000 individuals. Challenge Goodwill needed a solution that would provide the technology framework behind its public web site www.goodwill.org and its new intranet site. Known as MyGoodwill, this new site was to create a landmark organizational tool for the international nonprofit company, enabling thousands of Goodwill staff worldwide to collaborate, share best practices, and engage in real-time learning. Additionally, at Goodwill, as with other nonprofits, staying within budget is always a major concern. A solution that provided the most powerful and flexible technologies at the lowest cost was a high priority. Resolution When Goodwill first selected Liferay, their IT team had many reservations about going with an open source product. As progress continued, Goodwill's fears quickly dissipated. Bergman said, "First and foremost is an accelerated return on investment, which allows us to make additional site features possible sooner. Liferay Portal is easily adaptable to Goodwill's data center architecture and the diverse combination of technologies that we employ. Finally, it offers exceptional robustness and scalability. Liferay Portal was by far the most cost effective and efficient portal technology we considered." Liferay implemented the following: - Collaborative chat and message board capabilities
- Distribution of knowledge via Blogs
- "Wiki" pages that were regularly updated by visitors
- Interface to Computer-Based Training modules
- Document repository
Liferay easily exceeded all of Goodwill's expectations. Customizations that Bergman expected to be done in six to eight weeks were done over one weekend. Not only did it provide all the desired functionality, it also provided an unexpected, long-term cost savings. All fears were relieved when the Liferay implementations were completed.
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