Sensus, a global leader in utility infrastructure systems and resource conservation, sought to strengthen their worldwide presence by enhancing their ability to manage the messaging around their proven products and solutions at a global scale through a single cost effective tool. This presentation will discuss how Sensus was able to achieve this thru a Liferay-based solution utilizing Liferay 6’s latest features, and how the resulting solution helped them gain a competitive edge that will help them grow their business worldwide.
Sensus Uses Liferay to Strengthen Their Global Web Presence
1. Sensus Uses Liferay to Strengthen Their Global
Web Presence
October 25th 2011
Rivet Logic Corporation Presented By
1800 Alexander Bell Drive Alaaeldin El-Nattar
Suite 400 Principal Architect
Reston, VA 20191 Rivet Logic Corporation
Ph: 703.955.3480 Fax: 703.234.7711
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4. The Sensus Challenge
• Disparate messaging around products and solutions
• Each region has their own CMS
• US/Canada have a custom built CMS
• Maintainability issues
• Flexibility issues
• Integration with external systems is tough
• Content localization is not possible
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5. Sensus.com 1.0
• US/Canada website
• Inflexible look and feel
• Inflexible product and
solution structure
• Did the job but
couldn’t grow to meet
the global needs
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6. Sensus.com 1.0 Global Sites
• Look and feel
inconsistency
• Lack of control over
messaging around
products and
solutions
• Inability to manage
regional content
separately
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12. Dynamic Web Content
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13. Localization
• Liferay natively supports localization
• All portal content will be localizable
• One tool for all regional authors
• Same content can be authored in multiple languages
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15. Liferay Challenges
• Sensus needed the following:
• Human readable URLs
• One page per solution
• One page per division
• One page per product line
• One page per product
• Product line and product navigation
• Geolocation
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16. Liferay Challenges
Country
Division Product
Product
Line
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17. Liferay Challenges
• Liferay’s default URLs are not good enough
• Liferay allows for creating custom friendly URLs
http://sensus.com/web/usca/solution?id=advanced-metering-infrastructure-ami
VS
http://sensus.com/web/usca/solution/advanced-metering-infrastructure-ami
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26. The Basic Concept
• Completely decouple authoring from presentation
• A simple authoring process:
• Authors create content using Web forms
• Authors categorize content
• Content is auto-published to the right spot
• Look and feel is automatically taken care of
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27. How it works (Authoring)
ARTICLE
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28. How it works (Categorization)
Country
PUBLISH
US
PRODUCT
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Line
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30. Comparison
• Before • After
• Non scalable, proprietary CMS that did • Enterprise level solution + community
not allow control of design, layout, and and enterprise support
most content.
• Dynamic CMS that meets the needs of
• Did not have flexibility to adapt to current business and provides flexibility
continued growth.
to adapt to future.
• Did not support regionalization,
internationalization, and 3rd party • Have infrastructure to support
integration (Sharepoint, etc..) regionalized product offerings and
• Poor readiness for Marketing (SEO, internationalized languages
SEM, micro sites, Salesforce • Support for 3rd party integration,
integration) document management, SSO
• Overall a reduced ability to extend our • Marketing / content creation ready:
current web offering SEO, quickly deploy micro sites/landing
pages, WYSIWYG editing, drag and drop
layouts
• Already looking at ways to expand into
other parts of our business (training,
document management) due to the
flexibility that Liferay offers
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32. What the future holds
• Sharepoint integration
• Adding global sites to sensus.com
• French
• German
• Content translations on International Site
• English
• French
• Spanish
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33. Standards & Openness
• Liferay is:
• Standards compliant
• Easy to maintain
• Open source
• Highly customizable
• Has a healthy community
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