WebTrends
“Sitecore provides an ideal architecture for both content management and integration with our own web analytics solutions and the Salesforce.com CRM platform.”
-Nate Manley, Senior Programmer Analyst
Summary
From the very start Sitecore’s architecture, whether out of the box or through customization, has been able to meet every business need thrown at WebTrends.com with
speed, flexibility and dependability.
Challenge
In the Spring of 2005 WebTrends was sold by NetIQ to a large private equity fund, giving WebTrends an opportunity to rework its entire IT infrastructure, including its web presence. Although this change presented an exciting opportunity to start over with a “clean slate” of IT systems, WebTrends only had a few months for system selection, development and deployment.
Knowing that the company’s IT applications landscape would be rapidly reworked, a key functional requirement for WebTrends was to enable seamless integration between the website, the Salesforce CRM system, and other core systems that were yet to be selected. WebTrends anticipated that some of these systems would be delivered online via the software as a service (SaaS) model, so the goal was to select a CMS platform that would facilitate SaaS integration using XML web services and SOAP technologies.
A final set of CMS requirements involved suitability for web analytics and search engine optimization. Ideally, the CMS should enable WebTrends to easily “tag the site” for analysis using WebTrends On Demand. In addition, the CMS must produce search engine-friendly URLs that could easily be indexed across the Internet.
Solution
After reviewing several CMS solutions, the WebTrends IT team determined that Sitecore had the ingredients they were looking for. It was clear that Sitecore could provide the following:
- A proven CMS offering all the core features. Tostart, WebTrends had basic content management needs. Sitecore’s solid track record and its list of reference sites made it clear that Sitecore delivered the fundamental CMS features WebTrends required.
- A mature, robust technical infrastructure built on.NET. Sitecore emerged as the most mature choice among .NET-based CMS systems, and its open API would clearly facilitate WebTrends’ integration requirements with internal and external systems.
- Additional features and add-ons - such as friendly URLs, aliases, and the MetaTag module - to streamline WebTrends On Demand tagging and offer inherent search engine optimization advantages.
- Total control over site design and presentation. WebTrends could not be restricted by a CMS that imposed limits on layout and design. On the contrary, it became clear that Sitecore’s presentation engine can accommodate any layout approach that renders HTML and CSS.
Result
After a 10-12 week design and development process, WebTrends went live with its new website on-schedule. The transfer from NetIQ was seamless, and thousands of content items were migrated into a set of new Sitecore templates in less than a week. As anticipated, Sitecore’s approach to templates and renderings enabled total design flexibility, so the design stage moved quicker than expected. Sitecore’s HTML and the media library vastly improved the quality and organization of old content. New content is added every week and the process of content management is distributed among multiple users in the company, each with different business roles.
At go-live, the WebTrends team could immediately analyze lead conversion, visual path analysis, and scenario analysis using WebTrends On Demand. In addition, marketing success is continually measured as new campaigns are deployed. For example, using Sitecore aliases and sidebar promos – coupled with web forms that feed visitor responses into salesforce.com – WebTrends streamlined campaign deployment and improved interaction with visitors and customers.
Technical Description
A marketing content team of writers and designers regularly login to the CMS server and use all of the core features and a few add-on modules, such as the MetaTag module. Content is published daily to a load-balanced web farm via the Staging Module. WebTrends leverages publishing groups, controlled publishing, and versioning to stage and schedule content deployments.
One set of these user controls drives a key component of the WebTrends leads process and downstream CRM integration with salesforce.com. Selected areas of the website are integrated with salesforce.com using its web services-based API, while other custom web forms write data directly into the WebTrends message-based EAI framework.
Sitecore’s ability to produce friendly URLs is a key ingredient for search engine optimization. This includes optimization for the site’s own search engine, which runs the Verity Ultraseek engine. Verity simply indexes the full text of each friendly URL on the website, just as many Internet search engines do.
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