The University of Liege ("ULg") has 20,000 students, 2,800 teacher-researchers and 4,300 employees. It is one of Belgium's biggest universities and boasts the broadest range of disciplines, with 10 faculties ranging from philosophy and literature to medicine to political sciences.

Belgian universities are organized into relatively autonomous faculties each of which has a separate online site with its own particular "house style" and even a specific logo. These sites that co-exist alongside the university's institutional site are managed autonomously, and each one has its own specific update process. The university used to have a small team of writers putting new content online, but their validation time tended to be very long and content was rarely up-to-date.

ULg therefore decided to completely decentralize its site updates in order that each department can update its own content. To do this, it needed a powerful and functionally rich – but easy-to-use – content management system (CMS) capable of handling very larger data volumes. It also needed to be able to control content by means of sophisticated yet flexible workflows, with fine rights management, workspaces and a system ensuring harmonized presentation of content. The future CMS also needed to be upgradeable, connectable to the existing application Intranet and easily adaptable through specific developments and add-ons.

The University Hospital Center ("CHU") needed a "Web Intranet" with the possibility of controlling content before publication and distributing information in a targeted manner according to the profile of recipients. The ultimate goal was to have a single content distribution site drawing on information from the Intranet and the ULg institutional website.

The faculty sites are now all in a JCMS environment. The faculties update their content themselves easily and rapidly in a coherent environment. One person has been nominated in each department to assume responsibility for content updates. Presently the institutional site hosts 3,440 pages, 19,200 documents and 25 workspaces; 200 writers (at least 2 per department) keep the content up-to-date. On the CHU's intranet portal the home pages of 76 medical services have been given a uniform style, although each department can manage specific menus. These departments along with 34 administrative services have a total of 300 writers and 100 validators; 147 workspaces coexist and are synchronized with the LDAP groups and incorporated in the ULg's proprietary single sign-on (SSO) system. Information is display in a targeted manner, according to user profiles; visibility is synchronized with the LDAP groups.

Didier Korthoudt, General IT Services Manager at the University, explains: "We examined more than twenty alternative CMS solutions before choosing Jalios JCMS. One of our imperative criteria was to find a tool open to other applications developed in-house, one that could adapt to the university's organization and handle very large volumes of information. We even looked at some open-source tools. Jalios convinced us that JCMS was the right choice because of its vast extension possibilities. It has easily integrated with our existing computer tools, such as the "myULg" internal portal and the university directory. It was vitally important for us to choose a tool capable of communicating with our IT system and able to integrate at several levels. For example, JCMS very easily assimilated our SSO system. I do not think we could have found such flexibility with a much "heavier" tool. In the end Jalios JCMS proved to be the most open solution."

Didier Korthoudt continues: "Thanks to JCMS and the interconnection between our public institutional website and our internal portal, we have dynamized the content on both of them. More specifically, this means that "myULg" can now display information drawn from the website and links to various administration intranets. When an author publishes news, he decides where it will be visible: on the internal portal or only on the web portal. Inversely, the website has a private part. JCMS manages the public part of the site, even if one section is visible only in-house (for example, student administration has a public part and a private part). We appreciate JCMS for its evolutivity and the fact that it really has no limits!"