About The client

The client is an Association of Research Institutes operating in Asia Pacific. The Association has Institutes spread internationally, they needed a common platform to collaborate and communicate with all the institutes together. As the Association grew, it research projects also grew and thus grew their project database.

Business Challenge

The existing content management system platform was built on an off-the-shelf product and over a period of time it had become quite inflexible limiting their ability to scale their web operations. There were several critical gaps in the existing CMS that continued to hinder their overall web ambitions. The key problems with the existing system included:

• Lack of flexibility in managing specialized news events in a way that differentiates from regular news days.
• High operational costs to keep up to speed with the version upgrades of CMS product.
• High development effort required to support innovative content types like topic based content aggregation.

In this context, the client wanted to replace the existing CMS product with a much advanced CMS that maintain the huge database and relevant data. And at the same time serve as a platform for notification and sharing news about the events and projects being pursued.
Since a there wasn’t a single CMS that answered the requirement, Ajoft Technologies recommended that the client build a CMS from ground up. Ajoft Technologies was chosen as the technology partner for this large core transformational initiative.

How the challenge was solved

Ajoft Technologies worked with the key stakeholders and analyzed the current operations that helped identify the requirements that would help the client move to the desired state. The key drivers for the solution included:

• Putting in place an advanced web content management system that is easy to use, intuitive, highly user friendly and facilitated easy transition between the two systems.
• Improved integration with the existing tools and systems, both upstream for content collection and downstream for content delivery.
• Reduce or eliminate manual tasks involved in editing and organizing content.
• Use latest technologies/open standards and advanced features like AJAX to support flexible content layout and section from clean, including in-context editing.
• Provide better collaboration between the departments and handle concurrency while during content editing more effectively.

Ajoft Technologies also leveraged its knowledge capital in web development to recommend a phased development and transition to the new CMS. Migration of aggregate content initially followed by primitive content was recommended. Key drivers to the phased approach were:

• Avoid big-bang transformation that is both disruptive and expensive.
• Focus on efficiency improvements and job enablement for content editing and page creation.
• Refine usability and functionality based on continuous user feedback
• Roll-out implementations to manage change effectively in a news environment that is constantly challenged for time and has zero tolerance for failures.

Ajoft Technologies architected, designed and developed the custom CMS with necessary features and flexibility that enabled the client to address the strategic needs of the content platform.

Business Benefits

Implementation of the Custom CMS provided user and administrators with the following key features:

• Ability to create webpages as the need arises which is a vast improvement from the earlier system.
• A flexible content model designed to account for specific needs of existing content types and is extensible to support future needs.
• User dashboard to surface key actions and information items to ensure seamless and structural workflow.
• News and announcements to feature latest events.
• Archive for the newsletters and other past data.
• Repository of the publications and events
• Management of the data and newsletters from different locations of the world simultaneously.