Background

When OK International Inc, a leader in Electronic Manufacturing business, launched its site in late 1990, it set out with the belief that the site should not be a mere online rendition of its products offering but a unique collection of content and functionality that made the best use of the Web for its long history in Electronic Manufacturing industries.

Three years later, it redesigned the site from the ground up and decided to custom-build a content management system (CMS). While the proprietary CMS worked well at first, by early 2007 it became apparent that the system was hindering OK International’s efforts in updateing and growing the site to meet the expanding needs of its buyers and its own sales team.

The proprietary code base of the CMS and peripheral systems prevented developers from extending functionality and, more importantly, from fixing bugs in the system—specifically those that occasionally erased all the content within the site.

Usability was also a big headache; many of the screens presented long, unmanageable lists of assets, with no ability to sort or filter the results.

CMS is all about the process

OK International wanted a sophisticated publishing system that could handle a high volume of content, but it didn’t want to build a custom system again.

Because OKi had a limited budget, it didn’t want to invest heavily in software and staff to support and manage a complex application. It also required an application that could integrate with other applications, including ad serving, bulletin boards, user authentication, and a search engine.

And the organization wanted an implementation partner that could perform the customization it required, and that could (cost-effectively) continue to modify the application as requirements changed.

OKi chose New Avenue Systems and its Cortina CMS solution because they “know the people behind it and their track record of both innovation and success in this space,”.

New Avenue provides literally all of the features we need today, along with other capabilities we will grow to need, at a much lower cost than anything else we've seen in the marketplace."

New Avenue's Cortina is a content management that provides content management as a turnkey service. The Cortina CMS solution delivers a complete set of features in a 100-percent browser-based interface, including source control, versioning, spell checking, link checking, comprehensive workflow, security monitoring features, multilingual interfaces, database management, and wireless compatibility.

A cost-effective solution

OK International used the CMS rebuild opportunity to also completely redesign back-end systems. It removed the proprietary CMS (which was doing double-duty as an application server), and discarded the aging proprietary database. It moved to Open Source application server and db server to handle database needs.

“ It's a totally outsourced solution that's given them a world-class application for a very reasonable price,“ said Leon Yeh, New Avenue’s CEO.

No time for downtime

Because OKi relied on the CMS to run the website presence, New Avenue had to implement the site with effectively no downtime for OKi. New Avenue project team defined an implementation process that allowed them to redesign the new layouts, create their users, groups, and workflow, and perform thorough testing of the new CMS, all without interrupting OKi’s existing site.

Before the site went live, teams from OKi and New Avenue did a final system test to verify that everything was operational in the staging environment. This configuration made going live as simple as literally hitting a switch and publishing content to the live server.

OKi was surprised at the relatively short learning curve for the new system. Based on their requirements, New Avenue implemented a new online publishing process, which took a little getting used to. But by the time the testing period was complete, the OKi staff was fully up to speed on the new system.

Lessons learned

OKi IT leaders learned several lessons during the effort, and they offer these tips on how to make a CMS work best for the online scenario:

• Pick the right partner.
  

  “We always knew we had a large amount of content on our site and in the CMS,” said John. “However, we learned that given the right interface and tools, that content doesn’t have to be daunting to interact with.

• Move as quickly as your business.
  

  “I can’t stress enough how important it is for a CMS to move as quickly as your business,” noted John. “Web sites change. Processes change. Any CMS has to be able to change rapidly to enable a new look and feel, a new site section, adjustment to workflow, or permissions.

• Integrate to win.
  

  Running a successful online publishing business means having to offer a wide range of functionality—typically provided by third-party applications—to satisfy clients, employees, and partners.

• Content is everything.
  

  Capitalizes on the advantages of user-friendly Web 2.0 an interactive platform that gets better the more people use it by continually updating data from multiple sources. It is designed for departmental usages. It is engineered for small to medium size manufacturing company

• Outsourcing can lessen the load.
  

  New Avenue provided major performance boost to the site: By decoupling the CMS from OKi's live serving environment, the server was no longer burdened with the overhead of serving Web pages and running a CMS, which greatly improved server performance.

• Focus on your core business.
  

  Outsourcing the CMS meant that Workforce no longer had the responsibility for managing and ensuring the availability and reliability of the solution. It was free to concentrate on its core business—providing world-class products.