Every day, the Canadian Cancer Society touches the lives of cancer survivors, their families and friends through their web presence. Powered by Sitecore, the Society manages thirteen bilingual web sites that inspire and educate visitors across the Canadian provinces and territories.
In selecting Sitecore as their Web Content Management System, the Society chose a solution that easily manages tens of thousands of web pages, provides usability and consistency for content authors and saves the organization $200,000 USD per year.
“ We needed to provide the best way to deliver a new web CMS without burdening the Society’s staff from learning a new system. „
- Glen McInnis, Practice Area Lead, Enterprise Content Management, non~linear creations
Challenge
$1,000,000 for an unsupported CMS?
The push factors were glaringly apparent. If the Society continued with their Vignette CMS for another five years, they would spend a million dollars (USD) on a CMS version that the vendor no longer supported.
A common scenario for many organizations with legacy systems, the cost and complexity of the status quo is often staggering when projected out several years. Organizations have to face the challenge of dealing with growing membership bases, increasing numbers of site visitors and the mission-critical role of the web in fundraising and mobilizing constituents. A CMS system that effectively supports these requirements – both today and in the future – becomes the engine for an organization’s reach and expansion.
And yet, adopting a new CMS can’t be taken lightly. Many risk factors need to be accounted for, including migration costs, change in technology platform and user adoption. This last point can’t be overemphasized: subject matter experts who are passionate about their content and who are changing members’ lives every day should not be held back by a system that is confusing or cumbersome. Usability and agility are paramount.
In the case of the Canadian Cancer Society, there were four critical hurdles that any CMS needed to clear:
1. The CMS vendor needed to provide excellent support in a cost structure that made sense for the organization.
2. The CMS needed to support multi-site, multi-lingual and high scalability requirements.
3. The migration effort from Vignette to the new CMS needed to be both feasible and affordable.
4. The CMS needed to provide an authoring experience that made sense to the site’s subject matter experts and site administrators.
Solution
A Non-Linear Success
The Canadian Cancer Society approached non~linear creations (NLC), a Sitecore-Certified partner, to help them understand how their requirements could be best addressed. NLC has worked on many Sitecore projects and is a champion of Sitecore’s ease of use for content contributors and tremendous flexibility for site developers.
NLC built a proof of concept, with Sitecore as the CMS. A truly dazzling aspect of the proof of concept involved automated content migration from Vignette to Sitecore. Why was this so important? In CMS implementations, a common requirement is to import data from an existing database, static html files or even a legacy CMS tool. This can often cost hundreds (if not thousands) of hours in complex coding or large-scale manual data entry. The Society faced a similar challenge and found a solution with NLC and Sitecore’s flexible API.
Sitecore and NLC were chosen based largely on the strength of the proof of concept which showcased Sitecore’s built-in features and NLC’s technical dexterity. In a nutshell, it showed the Society that Sitecore CMS offered the functionality needed for the website and that NLC and Sitecore together would allow the Society to automatically migrate more than 35,000 pages of content.
Working with the Society, NLC planned a migration of the 13 sites from Vignette to the Sitecore CMS, which provided three main benefits:
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Continuity for content authors: NLC extended the Sitecore CMS to provide content authors at the Society with functionality similar to that which they were accustomed to using.
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Content sharing between sites: The NLC team developed a Wizard-based mechanism that allows authors to share content between and within sites.
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Cost-effective migration: Manually migrating 35,000 pages of content would have taken years of effort, with costs in excess of $250,000. The NLC team developed innovative new code that replicated the site and moved all of the content into Sitecore in only 8 hours, very cost-effectively.
The Society has a large number of content authors throughout the country – so it was important to keep the user interface as familiar as possible. According to Glen McInnis, Practice Area Lead, Enterprise Content Management, NLC, “A lot of discussions were ‘how do we make this system familiar to our content authors without impeding on the Sitecore upgrade path?’ It was a matter of striking a balance between easy adoption and familiar use vs. the technical and maintenance considerations of modifying the CMS too heavily. We needed to provide the best way to deliver a new web CMS without burdening the Society’s staff from learning a new system.”
Result
Today, the Canadian Cancer Society is successfully managing thirteen bilingual sites with Sitecore. There are more than one hundred content editors across Canada – with a primary team in each office. Now each of these teams can manage content easily. In addition, the NLC team was able to replicate the existing environment for this not-for-profit at a fraction of the licensing costs. Some other benefits of the new sites include:
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Seamless integration: The sites’ structure and branding did not change at all – it looks the same as before – which was actually one of the Society’s goals. Visitors coming to the site would not notice any difference in look and feel.
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Huge cost savings: The Society is saving on licensing cost.
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Time savings: From now on, the Society will be able to focus their resources on research, programming and advocacy rather than IT infrastructure.
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Content repurposing: The Society can now share content in a quick and easy way for the content authors.