Presentation By Phil Helsel, Senior Sales Consultant – Content Management, Oracle Corporation
With the advent of Web 2.0, the online audience has become much more sophisticated. It’s not enough to just serve up content. Users want to be able to access the site from any device and to be able to interact with it.
Meanwhile, companies want to use the web to build up their brand equity by providing added-value services. This gives companies added feedback from their customers. Managing a present day web presence is about balancing bottom-up participation with top down management. It’s about providing your user communities a personal stake in the products that they feel strongly about and investing in your brand.
To protect your company’s reputation and brand, it is more important than ever to have a consistent message and relevant content. How do you reconcile that need against the business realities of multiple teams working from locations around the world?
It is critical to have a fairly extensive workflow to address these compound issues. This means that you want to automate as much of the workflow as possible. Below are four case studies of how companies are using Oracle content management solutions.
Renault F-1
Renault faced the challenge of creating a unified web presence with a decentralized IT architecture, mobile teams, and outside partners. To address these issues, they deployed Oracle Content Server, set up search capabilities, and built microsites to serve business needs. The result was an innovative, award-winning site. In the review below by Christine Blachford, BellaOnline’s Formula One Editor, you can see how a regular user interacts with the site.
“Firstly, the Renault Blog. It’s written by an insider, who goes under the name “RF1 Paddock Pass”. He’s obviously a mechanic, or an engineer, or someone who has access to all the bits and pieces that go into a race weekend. The wonderful thing about the blog is how honest and open it is. It’s a great way to connect to the team and get some inside information.
The team also provides an official podcast, which is available in iTunes, or the RSS feed is available for any other users. The podcast features interviews with the drivers, with some top engineer bods and anyone else who is associated with the team.
My Club Renault is the most innovative part of the website. You get a free Renault hat, plus some other incentives, but the most important stuff happens during the race. You can log in and get a dashboard view of what the driver is doing. When he turns left, an animated steering wheel turns left, when he goes right, it turns right. You can see when he changes gear. You can follow both Renault drivers as dots around a linear version of the track – just like they do in the garages.”
Genzyme
Previous versions of Genzyme’s legacy sites suffered from big inconsistencies in the individual page look and feel. While this distinction may seem trivial, the efficiency gained from publishing all of its content using fewer than 25 standard templates is significant. Moreover, since the content management system facilitates the separation of content and presentation elements, Genzyme can easily make minor template changes to change branding instead of manually updating individual Web pages or creating new sites to meet new guidelines.
For Genzyme, this functionality not only has reduced IT bottlenecks and provided a consistent look and feel across its Web sites, it also has generated significant ROI and timely communication with its customers via the Web.
Furthermore, the separation of content and presentation allows information to be delivered to mobile or other non-standard devices that are making inroads into the health care industry (i.e. kiosks, tablet PCs).The benefits generating this significant ROI are outlined in 10 separate categories listed below.
Benefit 1: Reduced Printing, Paper, Copying and Shipping Costs
With Genzyme’s Web sites providing 24×7 access to content, interested parties can obtain up-to-date information without Genzyme shipping them materials as it once did. META estimates each new site leads to an average cost savings of $32,500.
Benefit 2: Elimination of Site Maintenance Outsourcing Costs
Genzyme has eliminated its Web content management outsourcing costs, doing away with $100,000 in outsourcing expenses along with editing costs.
Benefit 3: Reduced Costs to Launch New Sites
Prior to using content management, it cost Genzyme approximately $100,000 and took six months to launch a new site. Now, costs are down to $40,000 on average with a 12-week launch cycle.
Benefit 4: Information Accessibility
Genzyme’s global presence and the needs of its employees, partners and clients require 24×7 access to its latest content and data. The only way this accessibility is possible is via self-service sites tailored to unique audiences.
Benefit 5: Reduced Compliance and Organizational Legal Risks
As part of the original justification for the content management system, Genzyme calculated the external costs for complying with an FDA-mandated change to its legacy Web sites. The costs were anticipated to be more than $22,167 per site using the old Web site maintenance and publishing techniques. Using content management, Genzyme anticipated 100 percent of these external costs could be eliminated.
Benefit 6: “On Branding” of All Sites with Consistent Look and Feel
The use of design templates, syndication features and standardized process for launching new sites allows Genzyme to realize many of its strategic goals, including the creation of a more consistent global brand, while supporting the individual brand images of Genzyme, its businesses and product groups.
Benefit 7: Timely, Immediate and Coordinated Content Updates
Given the time-sensitive nature of much of Genzyme’s content, the ability to create, modify and promote content across various sites at any time was a key strategic goal of the multi-site management system.
Benefit 8: Reduced Effort for Site Design, Maintenance, Administration and Recovery through Content and Site Coordination
Genzyme’s multi-site requirements dictated a system that could provide strong administration capabilities. Genzyme previously had one full-time employee (FTE) administrating three legacy sites in 2000. Two FTEs are now supporting 20 unique Web sites and will be able to support all 25 planned sites.
Benefit 9: User Ownership of Content and Its Freshness
Similar to the administrative benefits realized, the benefit of users having direct control of their content has allowed Genzyme to use its preferred multi-site approach instead of centralizing communications.
Benefit 10: Automated Content Renditioning to HTML and PDF Formats
Provides advanced publishing capabilities that allow native documents to be rendered automatically into HTML and PDF.
Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
The Oracle system provides a central repository for all foundation Web site and extranet content, which the organization’s employees contribute and manage easily using a Web browser. 
Prior to implementing content management, Susan G. Komen struggled with its library of documents and images. Frequently, high resolution graphics ended up on the website while low resolution images made their way into printed materials. It was difficult to manage the look and feel of the images correctly. Now, the digital asset management server does the conversion automatically, converting TIFF to JPEG or HTML to Word documents.
“Oracle’s platform has enabled us to take our Web site and affiliate extranet to the next level while utilizing limited internal resources. And while ‘hard-dollar savings’ are important to us as a nonprofit organization, it is more important that our affiliates and visitors receive accurate content in a timely manner.”
Amir Tabei, Director of Technology
Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
Marvel Entertainment
Marvel had their own in-house studio, so they built these micro-sites to market their movies. “Marvel fans will get an extra kick out of the mini-sites, which focus on our key families,” said marketing communications manager Bill Rosemann. “Now X-Men readers — with one touch of the mouse — can explore an entire mutant-related section! It’s our way of spotlighting our top titles while also providing readers with information on the series that explore some of the more unique avenues of the Marvel Universe.”
“The primary goal of the site upgrade was to create a simple way for Marvel.com’s different users — readers, retailers, toy collectors, movie fans, etc. — to access information pertinent to them in no more than two-to-three clicks,” explained Peter Mathews. “Additionally, we attempted to create a means through which users could both get up to speed — and stay on top of — Marvel’s ever-growing list of comic books and graphic novels. It was that goal of defining our key characters that inspired the idea for the mini-sites.”
They use the content management pieces to control the scripts and the other aspects of the movies. With this automatic format conversion, different destinations could be served with different versions of the file (i.e. high res images to creative team, low res images to the website)
Whenever a step in the workflow takes place, it writes to an audit log. This allows you to expand the workflow to include external sites and processes. For example, translating web site content from English to Chinese.