The Challenge
DB Breweries found that more and more internet users were requiring more and more information, from brewing methods and techniques to the nutritional value and history of its products. Information can change quickly, DB Breweries needed to be able to react quickly.
“Over the years the company has spent significant sums of money on small changes to our sites, we needed a product that would enable DB Breweries to take greater control of these minor changes and negate these continued and ongoing costs” – Hailey Bloore, DB Breweries Communications Manager
DB Breweries has no internal programming or design capabilities so the requirement was for an intuitive CMS WYSIWIG editor that required no knowledge of markup or programming techniques. DB Breweries also needed a CMS that ensured the ever increasing regulatory requirements of a large organization could be easily handled, was intuitive and would streamline the information change process; this included providing different access rights for staff with different roles.
It was essential that DB Breweries was able to create new templates and skins quickly and easily, but also have the ability to roll back any changes should the requirement arise. They needed a CMS that allowed them to create and deliver polls and FAQ’s quickly, all the things that other CMS’s say they can deliver,but the reality is they do it very poorly – if at all. The CMS architecture had to be flexible enough to cater to DB Breweries’s specific development requirements and allow for extended plug-in functionality.
There were specific requirements including:
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brand module that played Flash swf within site.
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staff profiles module for Flash swf within site.
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bar location module for dynamic Flash map of NZ bar locations with full bar detail.
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media management module with central media player handling media upload.
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transformation of any media type into Flash (FLV) video, compressed for web,and stored in a central library.
The Solution
A data-driven website developed in Microsoft .Net and SQL Server, all built within and managed by Telerik’s Sitefinity.
“Sitefinity ticked all the boxes” says Hailey. “From its fantastic content management and authoring tools, including drag and drop page editing, versioning and its flexible workflow process which ensures any site changes are delivered to those with the sign-off responsibilities.”
The many DB Breweries staff who actively use Sitefinity talk about the familiar Word-identical content authoring functionality and the fantastic out of the box modules which enabled greater interaction with its end users. Web 2.0 is about listening to your end users and responding accordingly, “…no other CMS we looked at came close to this level of functionality” said Hailey.
From a development perspective, Sitefinity delivered on all fronts. A fully exposed and open architecture ensured the additional modules that were required for the site could be easily integrated.
The Results
The amount of time required from its staff to publish this information to the web has been reduced. In particular, the workflow functionality has made a significant difference. Where in the past email was the only way changes could be shared with a predefined sign-off path, the entire process is now managed internally of Sitefinity.
With the increased levels of functionality, came increased opportunities to deliver more of what DB Breweries’s customers are after. Future initiatives for DB Breweries? The significance of its international markets would suggest it’s only a matter of time before Sitefinity’s multi language functionality is adopted.