Case Study: French Ministry of Defense achieves secure, scalable collaboration for 100,000+ users with Liferay

French Ministry of Defense - Customer Case Study

The French Armaments Procurement Agency (DGA), part of the Ministry of Defense, manages procurement, testing and future technology planning for French defense programs. To coordinate daily exchanges of technical, contractual and financial information among the DGA, armed forces, industry suppliers and support structures, the agency needed a secure, easy-to-use collaboration portal with configurable communities and workflows, broad integrations, strong X.509/smart‑card authentication and operation over a private European network.

Ippon Technologies implemented the EPNG collaboration platform on Liferay (with BEA WebLogic Integration for workflows and IPDiva as a secure reverse proxy), providing LDAP and certificate‑based auth, a detailed community model and extensive integrations. EPNG runs 20 custom portlets (mail, forums, document libraries, digital signatures, workflow administration, external app access), was tuned to scale, connects to the Ministry intranet and now supports 100,000+ users and major suppliers (Thales, Dassault, EADS, DCN) plus 20 external applications such as live parts inventories that enable direct ordering.

French Ministry of Defense

Geoffray Gruel

Director, Ippon Technologies