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Since the Internet emerged as a new channel for interacting with customers and reaching out to new global markets, many organisations have implemented a wide range of websites. Corporate communication groups have created corporate.com sites and country teams have created their own local sites. In addition to these public facing websites, most organisations have also developed several intranets to facilitate internal knowledge sharing and extranets to do e-business with their customers and partners.
In general, all these websites have one thing in common. They were created in a ?stand-alone' and ?ad-hoc' fashion. Consequently, they function as (local) information silos, which often fail to comply with corporate messaging and even threaten corporate brand equity. Frequently, there is no sharing of information and best practises, and the sites are extremely expensive to maintain. Overall, these unco-ordinated online initiatives represent a duplication of time and effort and make ineffective use of software, hardware, corporate infrastructure and manpower.
Therefore, many organisations need to rationalise their global web operations. The main goal of this rationalisation phase is to streamline different Internet and Extranet projects around the globe. Sub goals can be defined as:
a. Ensure brand and message consistency across all websites;
b Facilitate the re-use of common site elements, such as branding and common content, across multiple websites;
c. Allow content owners, such as marketing teams (central and local), to maintain their own sites in a fast and easy to execute model;
d. Empower local (country) teams to fine-tune their local websites according to local market requirements;
e. Create a clear task-division between the roles and responsibilities of the corporate marketing and IT teams, as well as the local marketing teams;
f. Benefit from a cost efficient solution to control all web operations around the world from one single system.
This whitepaper explains why the Tridion R5 Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution with its unique Tridion Blueprint Management functions is the most effective and cost efficient solution on the market for controlling your global website operation.
Challenge
The Internet has become a key medium for companies to interact with their customers and business partners and reach out to new global markets. Many companies face a common challenge to keep their online communication and marketing activities consistent, relevant and up to date across the entire corporate network. As a result they need to co-ordinate their organisational activities and manage their supporting systems more efficiently.
On a more detailed level, marketing-driven organisations are facing the following common challenges:
- Keeping content up-to-date across all web sites How can you enable content owners to easily update business critical marketing and customer support information?
- Maintaining global brand consistency How can you protect brand-value and corporate identity via predefined templates and master communications blueprints? How can you modify global branding across all international channels within hours? How can you more efficiently collaborate with creative agencies providing branding and message components?
- Streamlining global online marketing processes How can you get all new product collateral and materials online within days? How can you achieve a globally consistent message for new product launches? How can you ensure that local marketing teams avoid re-inventing the wheel? And even more important, how can you empower local teams to fine-tune their communication with local markets and target groups?
- Managing web content in multiple languages How can you implement a cost efficient content translation process? How can you create and manage multilingual websites in an effective manner?
- Delivering content across multiple channels How can you re-use the same content for different channels and publications, i.e. websites, kiosks, portals, wireless and paper collateral?
- Keep operational costs down How can you reduce multiple local systems? How can you eliminate expensive webmaster bottlenecks?
This whitepaper addresses these challenges through detailed description of the unique Tridion Blueprint Management functions.
Blueprinting Model
This section provides a detailed description of the way the Tridion Content Management and Blueprinting functions can be implemented as the foundation for a global website operation.
Creation of Standard ?Building Blocks'
For the purpose of efficiently managing websites, Tridion has developed the Tridion ?building blocks' model. Within this model the different elements of a website such as content, layout, navigation structure and applications are managed as separate ?building blocks'.
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