It proved possible to meet the demanding project targets in a very short time and with comparatively few resources. Of help in this process was the modern technological basis of Microsoft .NET as well as the wide reaching experience already gained by portamundi with the use of contentXXL in other international projects.
The client
The company SHUTTLE Inc. (until 14.10.1997 known as 'HOLCO Enterprise Co., Ltd.') which is based in Taiwan, is the headquarters of the worldwide operating Shuttle group.
Shuttle Inc. was founded in 1983 and has established itself worldwide as a reputed producer of high quality mainboards and innovative XPCs. Shuttle has been the object of much praise from the international specialist press as well as from dealers for its constantly high product quality, superb performance and favourable price-performance ratio. Shuttle is one of the most experienced manufacturers in its sector. Effective management, innovative R & D and the performance level of its products form a solid basis for a successful and long term partnership with its customers: distributors, computer retailers and OEMs.
In the meantime, the turnover of Shuttle Inc. has risen to over 200 billion dollars. Shuttle Inc. has been a listed company since 1998. Shuttle mainboards, XPCs and PC components have found their way to millions of satisfied customers worldwide.
Shuttle’s European headquarters was founded in Germany in 1991 and is today based in Elmshorn in the state of Schleswig Holstein.
For the target groups of the company – gamers, PC users at home and in the media but also an increasing number of business users – the internet is of above average importance as an information medium. Therefore the company’s web presence is of crucial importance for the team led by Bastian Fröhlig – the PR manager for Shuttle Germany.
The task
The very comprehensive content was hitherto managed and updated manually, with some use of tools, by a committed team at great cost. The growing variety of products and the tapping of new target groups, however, make the use of a Content Management System an urgent necessity.
This was not just a question of simpler management and higher emotional content. High functionality was a particular demand from the word go. In addition to that, time planning was also a challenge. After the awarding of the contract there were to be only a few weeks before going live!
The solution with contentXXL
The Business Content Management System contentXXL fulfils these requirements through the use of prepared components based on Microsoft .NET. In this way modules are available for announcements, contact information, the provision of documents and forums etc. These can be placed via drag and drop in browser based site managers and be designed via parameters or templates. In addition to this, individual content objects such as products, links and downloads can be related via a Content Relationship Management either manually or automatically via categories. In this way, visitors can find published information in different places, which is always complete, and in an updated context. This does not involve any extra work on the part of the system administrator, the contents being created only once and then automatically kept consistent.
Together with the Shuttle team, on the basis of all the screen designs created by the client as well as the functional requirements, a prototype was produced in the course of a two-day workshop. Subsequently, it was immediately possible to begin with the transfer or new creation of contents. At the same time, the templates used by portamundi were completed. The Shuttle employees themselves then were already in a position to take over responsibility for the creation of the individual theme areas and the management of content.
The high requirements with regard to performance and the number of users also represented a particular challenge – several million PIs per month with considerable peaks in demand. In this area contentXXL works with intelligent caching of pages or of parts of pages. Content which is frequently called up is automatically kept in the main memory. In this way the pages can be loaded quickly despite their complex design and the demands made on the hardware required remain relatively low. The generation of static HTML pages and all its associated problems such as personalisation, access or consistency, which is often generally the case with comparable systems, is therefore not necessary. Further requirements were the management of hundreds of thousands of subscriptions, simplicity of content creation, secure dispatch as well as evaluation of various newsletters dealing with different themes and in different languages directly via the system.
contentXXL was specifically developed for the demands of multilingual internet presences. All objects can be created in different language variations. This allows switching of languages within the context of the website as well as a language fallback in a standard language, in case individual content has not yet been localised. Thus Shuttle was immediately able to go online with language variations in English, German and French, further languages being planned.
Another important requirement was also the internal search function, which allows specific lists of hits, grouped according to types of content such as product information or downloads. Within this process, such documents as PDF files are also searched. This is all in addition to optimised provision of content in relation to URL, meta information and ranking for search engines such as Google. Whereas it was possible to fulfil numerous requirements via standard functionalities, some of the performance criteria desired also required
Adaptations and expansions. Thus the existing contact module in the area of searching for retailers was expanded by including client specific attributes and functions. An extranet for retailers and distributors adds the finishing touch.
The benefit
It proved possible to meet the demanding project targets in a very short time and with comparatively few resources. Of help in this process was the modern technological basis of Microsoft .NET as well as the wide reaching experience already gained by portamundi with the use of contentXXL in other international projects.