Stanford GSB: MyGSB rebuilt on Liferay, with its own menu for every admit, student, professor and staff member

An admit who got an offer in the December round, an admit deferring a year for work, a first-year MBA, a mid-career professional in the one-year MSx program, a PhD student, a professor and a staff member all open MyGSB, and each comes for something different: welcome information and a skills assessment before arriving, courses and student life, research resources, or the school’s policies, finance and HR pages. Many belong to more than one group, like a staff member who is also a student, or an MBA student already admitted to a second degree.

MyGSB ran on Drupal, where some two dozen departments, from Financial Aid and Student Life to Human Resources, Facilities and Case Writing, kept their own pages and decided who could see them. GSB had approved a new design and wanted it built on Liferay DXP, the platform behind Stanford’s AXESS portal, without losing any department’s content or the rules about who sees what.

GSB’s design, built as components its authors control

From January 2022 we built GSB’s approved design on Liferay DXP 7.2 as 20 components, from hero banners, cards and link lists to deadlines, events, announcements, profiles and tabs, on seven page templates, and documented each one, with its content structure and settings, in a design-system guide for GSB’s team.

A menu for each audience

Navigation, content and search follow each person’s audience, read from Stanford’s own groups when they sign in with their Stanford account: 16 audiences, from each admission round to faculty and staff. People in more than one audience switch between them from the header, and the menu and content change with them; an alert bar in the header carries urgent notices.

Built around the school’s own tools

Deadlines, events and announcements come from MyDigest, where the school publishes them, filtered by audience. Faculty and staff got Syllabi Search, to find syllabi, reading lists, slides and exams across years of courses by subject, catalog number, year, quarter or professor; admits got a direct link to their skills assessment; and search covers both MyGSB and GSB’s public site, with topic filters.

Every department’s content, moved over

We mapped the Drupal content to new authoring structures and taxonomies, proved the migration on a sample, migrated the departmental sites and kept them current with delta migrations until launch. Each department’s author group and each page’s audience permissions came across too, checked against the old site.

Authors ready, and a production site in Stanford’s cloud

We trained GSB’s content authors from June 2022, with workshops and videos on pages, content and fragments, set up the production site on Liferay Cloud with Stanford’s team in 2023, and supported the site after launch.

MyGSB went live on Liferay in June 2023: one intranet where each admit, student, professor and staff member sees the menu, deadlines and events of their own program, published by the school’s own departments. It still runs on Liferay in September 2026.

We built MyGSB from January 2022 through its launch and supported it until August 2023, while also working on AXESS, Stanford’s university-wide portal for students, faculty and staff.