Case Study: Sapienza University of Rome achieves a unified, high-performance collaborative portal for students and faculty with Acquia

Sapienza University of Rome Building a Collaborative Portal for Students and Faculty

Sapienza University of Rome, the oldest university in Rome and the largest in Europe with about 125,000 students, faced a fragmented web presence built on three different CMS platforms, hundreds of uncoordinated sites, duplicated content, inconsistent user experiences, and high management costs. Seeking to re-engineer its ICT and deliver a scalable, standards-based portal with granular permissions and strong community support, Sapienza evaluated platforms and chose Drupal to unify communications, departmental sites, and services.

Working with Cineca (U‑GOV Portal) and Acquia Professional Services, Sapienza rolled out a three‑phase Drupal portal—communication, federated department sites, and a unified service portal—using participatory design and staged previews. The result is a collaborative university portal used by over 100,000 people, praised as a national center of excellence; it improved Sapienza’s web‑use ranking, supports peaks of 144,000 page views/hour (1.4M/day), serves 16% mobile visits, enables 115 distributed editors with centralized permissions, eliminates data duplication, and delivers a simpler, more consistent user experience.

Sapienza University of Rome

Tiziana Catarci

Vice Rector Infrastructure and ICT