The Regzone financial legislation knowledge portal. A Sitecore website development case study

Transcription

1 The Regzone financial legislation knowledge portal. A Sitecore website development case study CMS is a full-service top 10 global law firm, (Am Law 2013 Global 100). With 59 offices in 33 countries across the world, revenues totalled 842m in CMS acts for the majority of the DAX 30, a large number of the FT European 500 and a number of Fortune 500 companies. CMS provides clients with specialist, business focused advice in law and tax matters. With 2,800 legal professionals across the world, working in sector-based teams and expert in project management, CMS focus is on their clients and fulfilling their objectives. The Sitecore solution has delivered exactly what we needed - a highly flexible platform that can dramatically reduce operating costs each year whilst delivering a hugely improved user experience. Ash Saluja, Partner, CMS

2 Project Brief The Sitecore solution has saved the RegZone team at least 5 days each a month in administration time as it has removed a huge number of manual administration tasks. It has also reduced the time to market for new information to reach target audiences. Financial institutions account for over half of CMS client base. The market they operate in is heavily regulated and extremely fastchanging. It is a real challenge for in-house lawyers to keep up to date with the latest regulation. Because a lot of the key contacts at financial institution clients are responsible for large geographic areas, it is extremely difficult to keep track of the legislation in all these jurisdictions. CMS required an online service to become a one-stop-shop for this information and deliver it, tailored to their users footprint. The key objectives for the solution were to: Act as a reference and research tool: Regulation varies between the insurance, banking and investment business sectors. So the site needed to reflect the key sectors within the financial institutions industry. Subscribers and web visitors needed to easily find and receive information tailored to their own requirements in a very userfriendly way. They need to receive ealerts, newsletters and digests as a news service direct to their inboxes and mobile devices. Be a sales tool for CMS: The solution needed to demonstrate CMS expertise in the financial institutions sector and increase its brand value, lead to new client engagements and support pitches by providing value-add. Become a Know-How database for CMS own lawyers: A key purpose of the solution was to act as a research tool for CMS lawyers and to share documents and know-how across different offices. It should save CMS lawyers time in their legal research, and by sharing the information across all of CMS offices, prevent duplication of work. 2

3 Solution Previously, RegZone was managed using a combination of Microsoft (Excel, Word and Outlook) and a SharePoint system first developed in Every task was highly manual and the system did not support daily news updates, sophisticated search queries, alerts according to user preferences or multi-language content. ClearPeople used Sitecore CMS and DMS along with a core set of requirements relying on Sitecore ECM to render and distribute the campaigns. Due to the complex requirements, ClearPeople also utilised other products from the Sitecore AppCenter including Delivery, Preview and Spam Check. All products and services were brand new installations. The solution was deployed in a hybrid approach to host and scale the solution by utilising Sitecore s Azure SDK. For example, the Sitecore Content Delivery servers can be scaled out using Azure PaaS while the Analytics databases run in Azure IaaS. CEP ECM 3

4 Why Sitecore? A key requirement for CMS was for a best of breed content management system which enabled their in-house team to make edits and produce and distribute campaigns using a complex set of rules, but without the ongoing need for developers. A key requirement for CMS was for a best of breed content management system which enabled their in-house team to make edits and produce and distribute campaigns using a complex set of rules, but without the ongoing need for developers. Sitecore s wide range of features and products not only offered good value for money but the editing interface within the content management system is easy and intuitive to use. A particular area that impressed was the ability with Sitecore DMS and ECM to match relevant content with user preferences and therefore personalise the website and content to specific audiences. One of the main objectives of this project was for the effective management of based content distribution to subscribers in the form of instant alerts, digests, publications and newsletters. A core component of the solution is therefore a tied integration with Sitecore ECM ( Campaign Manager) to manage and publish the thousands of content items to multiple channels in parallel. Another important factor in the selection of Sitecore was its ability to support the management of content across mobile and tablet devices. With many of CMS target audiences accessing the content offered on their mobiles, it was critical to choose a platform which would support a responsive user interface. 4

5 Why Sitecore? The Campaign Manager helps CMS to manage subscription data, report on the success of campaigns and easily provide a web version of all communications that have been sent. In fact, a majority of the content that is produced is authored in a bespoke extension to ECM allowing article authors to tag and segment content. 5

6 Why Sitecore? When content is uploaded to the Campaign Manager, it is tagged according to a centrally managed taxonomy. The is then issued to all those subscribers whose preferences match the taxonomy of that article. This results in an extremely personalised yet efficient service. 6

7 A worldfirst hosting solution Azure Iaas SQL Server Azure Paas SQL Azure The hosting solution ClearPeople implemented brings together an underlying Azure infrastructure using both IaaS and PaaS with Sitecore Content Management System, Campaign Manager, Digital Marketing Suite and the AppCenter. Web Master Analytics Web Core Content Management Server Content Delivery Server 7

8 Outcomes 1 Language capability: 2 News: 3 Research: 4 Automatic and dynamic News items from the financial institutions RegZone enables its visitors to conduct management of subscriber preferences: Sitecore allows CMS to deliver multilingual content to subscribers and add it to the website. An article, report, news item or can be issued in more than one language. RegZone subscribers can indicate their language preference and if a relevant article is available in this language, they will receive it as requested. sector are added to RegZone everyday. By tagging each news item, it is replicated across the site as follows: News wizard web visitors can interrogate the news to review stories on a particular topic Topic pages the relevant news stories are profiled on every topic landing page Profiled in daily and weekly digests the digest s contain the news items which match a subscriber s preferences. RegZone is therefore a comprehensive sector news service for its subscribers sophisticated data interrogations in a number of ways: Advanced search users are able to conduct advanced searches of the data owing to the intelligent taxonomy Research The Regzone team is particularly proud of the customised research tools in the RegZone toolkit. Each of these is a sophisticated, searchable database, allowing for quick queries and detailed analysis of data on recent regulatory decisions, timetables, jargon, and more. Mobile users are able to download app -style icons to their devices allowing easy access to each of the tools. The full versions of these tools can be accessed from the homepage. As all the content has been tagged to topics, only the relevant items appear on each topic page. Again, this ensures that CMS delivers only relevant information to each audience type. Subscribers are able to personalise the content they receive by providing their preferences at sign up. Sitecore then automatically stores their details and the integrated ECM ensures they are only sent the most relevant updates. 8

9 Outcomes RegZone has revolutionised our ability to generate and share know-how between our regulatory lawyers across our 59 offices in 39 countries. The efficiencies and reach of the new platform have meant we have been able to establish and share the cost of a central research function to support RegZone and our 300 internal subscribers across Europe. Paul Edmondson, Partner, CMS Ongoing support: PowerBI: Storage of information: RegZone is now fully supported by ClearPeople, a certified Sitecore partner and backed by a Sitecore support agreement. This ensures the site can be upgraded, improved and further supported by ClearPeople on a day to day basis. This provides peace of mind to CMS. The PowerBI facility enables CMS to report easily on, and analyse, subscribers preferences. The Sitecore database is an extremely comprehensive and actively managed database. The sophisticated tagging ensures information can be easily found on the user-friendly interface. Accessed from anywhere, CMS lawyers around the world can access the same information at their fingertips, creating much better relationships, synergies and knowledge use acrossthe firm. 9

10 Results CMS and ClearPeople are very proud of RegZone. The combination of people, expert knowledge and technology has realised the RegZone team s vision of a user friendly and valuable knowledge portal. We believe the functionality and experience of the whole service is like no other in the market today and provides the highest quality and best source of data in Europe to be disseminated to end users. RegZone is already starting to deliver on its business objectives and is an extremely valuable tool in CMS sales process. It is a core part of CMS brand in the financial institutions sector. Three months after launch, statistics showed: 2014 organisational subscribers 90% of CMS financial institutions sector key accounts are subscribers 21% penetration into the FTSE 100 As a specialist technical website, getting the right people subscribed and visiting the site is more important than getting as many people as possible visiting. RegZone s target market is the legal community within financial institutions across Europe - Three months after going live, 90% of clients in this sector had subscribed. The Sitecore-based solution has saved the RegZone team at least 5 days a month in administration time as it has removed a huge number of manual administration tasks. Freeing up lawyer s time in collating and approving content through an easier interface and search functionality also means that CMS is able to free up more time for billable work. Furthermore, the time to market of information has drastically been reduced with less than 1/10 of billable time now taken to get content published in a variety of areas. RegZone is used as a new business tool, with the site and its capabilities being demonstrated to potential CMS clients. Already it has paid dividends, with CMS securing additional pitch opportunities based on their demonstrable expertise via RegZone. 10

11 A world-first hosting solution 11

12 Finalists Finalists 12