Company Profile SmartFixtures.com is second half of SmartFurniture.com, a leading online furniture reseller delivering innovative modular space organization solutions. The company was originally imagined in 1995 at Stanford University to address real space-management headaches in residential and home office environments. SmartFurniture.com was born, delivering a "Design on Demand" concept with innovative modular furniture, retail fixtures, and shelving systems. The company has been featured on major television networks such as HGTV and ABC and boasts awards in customer service and innovation from the likes of Dell and the National Retail Federation. Smart Furniture is a privately held Delaware corporation headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA. SmartFixures.com targets corporate buyers across a wider variety of industries and is driven, in part, by Salesforce.com. Challenge SmartFixtures.com required the use of technology that would appropriately reflect the company's dedicated to innovation and functionality. While the sister site, SmartFurniture.com, addressed the home retail market, SmartFixtures.com demanded the ability to manage accounts for a number of different industries and markets. The organization was running solely on Linux and Java, with the site driven by Salesforce.com and featuring new cutting edge technology. To meet its technical needs, the Smart Fixtures team needed a next-generation, best of breed platform with flexibility and the ability to provide heavy web-services support on the backend. To meet its business needs, the site also had to be extremely easy for administrators, a number of sales account managers and other non-technical users to manage and learn. The site was tested in Jetspeed, Infoglue and a number of other JSR-168 compliant technologies but ultimately, the team wanted a Java-based platform. Given the content-heavy business model, SmartFixtures.com also wanted an enterprise-ready content management system. With this in mind, it was clear to CIO, Chris Matthews, that Liferay was the best choice. "I was tracking Liferay Portal for the past 2 or 3 years and knew it was the perfect ffit in terms of usability and technical innovation." Resolution Since implementing Liferay, SmartFixtures.com has delivered a number of impressive extensions to Liferay's core functionality. In particular, it highlights the Shopping Portlet: The team extended and enhanced the original Liferay Shopping Cart Portlet to allow individuals to add items to their cart while not logged-in to Liferay. Additionally, enhancements were made to expedite the create account/login and checkout process, making the whole process a 3-4 click experience. To further extend the user's experience, the team also added an Adobe Flex based product catalog browser that enables fast searching and comparison of products that is seamlessly integrated with the Liferay checkout basket.
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