D&E Communications is an integrated communications provider delivering creative, cutting-edge technological solutions to individuals, families, homes and businesses throughout central Pennsylvania, including high-speed data, broadband Internet access, local and long distance telephone, data, professional IT services, network monitoring, security solutions and video services. Guided by a bold vision of the future, D&E is changing the technological landscape and changing lives for the better.
(Please see
http://www.decommunications.com ) for more information)
D&E Communications provides residential and commercial broadband (DSL) Internet access throughout the central Pennsylvania region. In an effort to increase customer retention in today’s highly-competitive landscape, it was necessary for D&E to provide its broadband customers with value-added features and benefits to enhance their online experience. In addition to providing merely a link to access their email, D&E wanted to create a web portal that would allow customers to connect with the wide range of content that is currently available online. D&E’s business model also included promotion of affiliate partner services on the site (through pay-per-purchase programs) to help generate incremental revenue.
Marketing and delivery of these services through the online portal is accomplished via web content and applications. D&E needed the ability to rapidly develop its own content, provide links on the portal to third party content providers and manage the promotional banner advertising. The upkeep and maintenance of the site created a challenge using classic tools and the use of relatively manual processes, technologies and procedures. As a result, D&E choose Collective Intelligence and Jahia to manage the content for the portal.
As many large organizations are discovering, the “legacy” or “classic” approach to online content administration is becoming inefficient due to the considerable time required to maintain the content - which frequently results in “stale” web content on these sites. Other challenges to the legacy approach include an inconsistent look and feel on the site, inconsistent navigation and poor reuse of content.
Information technology personnel at D&E researched the issue of managing and delivering web content for a number of years. The research led to the discovery of portal technology. After a review of several portal vendors, D&E determined the J2EE open source portal from Jahia (
http://www.jahia.org ) best met their needs.
Typical portal technology provides many features out of the box:
· Content Management – security, editing, versioning, publishing, workflow
· Security Framework – authentication, authorization, application roles and policies
· Content Reuse – content referencing, dynamic content presentation, content indexing and searching
· Content Structuring for Consistency and Flexibility – automatically maintained navigation, templates and styles. Easy to “re-skin” look and feel and rearrange content on pages.
· Application Framework – security, portlet integration and industry standards
· Contextualization – ability to push targeted content to classes of users
· Personalization – capability of users to customize the look and feel of the portal
· Multiple Delivery Channels – wireless, PDA, desktop
· Multiple Content Channels – WebDAV, web services, remote portlet, RSS feeds
· Integration – standards based integration to backend content
For the first phase, D&E did not require all of the portal technology features listed above. Jahia easily supported all the features needed by D&E.
4 The Approach
Like many other technologies, portal technology can be implemented correctly to achieve the desired results, or when applied improperly, will only create more issues for the organization. D&E information technology staff was unfamiliar with the application of portal technology. The decision was made to employ the services of Collective Intelligence, Inc to help implement the portal.
The D&E Communications portal project was a typical full lifecycle portal implementation. The project consisted of:
· Planning
· Analysis - including prototyping
· Design
· Implementation
· Testing, Tuning and Rollout
D&E’s staff participated in all phases; especially content creation on the portal. Collective Intelligence, Inc focused on creating:
· Navigational Structures
· Page Templates
· Dynamic Content and Structures
· Portlets
· Platform Configuration and Tuning
As with any portal project at Collective Intelligence, Inc, a primary goal was to make D&E’s staff self-sufficient at maintaining the portal moving forward.
5 The Results
The result of the engagement is a very successful portal implementation. At the time of this writing, the portal is available at:
Figure 1 - Sample Portal Screenshot
An incredible amount of content was created in a relatively short amount of time due to the efficiency of the portal technology. Credit also goes to the extremely talented set of D&E content authors who participated in the project.
The portal knowledge transfer was so successful that D&E immediately began building another portal using the same technology with no assistance from Collective Intelligence, Inc.
6 References
For more information about D&E Communications or to speak with the Project Manager in charge of the portal implementation, please contact:
Christopher C. Bryan
D&E Communications, Inc
Manager
D&E Business Applications On-Demand
Jazzd Interactive at
www.dejazzd.net
717-738-8726