Lloyds TSB International Private Banking manages content with Magnolia

Lloyds TSB IPB Uses Magnolia October 2008

Context
This presentation was given at the “Open Source Meets Business” conference In January 2009
It was written in October 2008
This is a light version of the initial presentation.

London Gibraltar Luxembourg Switzerland (Geneva, Zurich) Monaco Dubai Miami Ecuador Uruguay Paraguay … Lloyds TSB International Private Banking operates on a global basis. Argentina Colombia Guatemala Lloyds TSB International Private Banking Brazil

Lloyds and Open Source
Where a Lloyds TSB standard, strategic, approved product that meets an application’s requirements already exists, it must be used - whether open source or proprietary
The selection process for OSS is similar to that for any third party offering, but with some additional considerations to accommodate criteria specific to OSS.
Lloyds TSB Group IT will not normally undertake to participate in Open Source developer communities, or commit to contribute to open source projects.
To avoid complicating both environments and licensing responsibilities, LTSB users will not ordinarily make direct changes to any Open Source code acquired.

Why having chosen Magnolia?
We needed to re-factor our Intranet for the following reasons:
It had grown faster than expected
It had become very uneasy to maintain
It had become very uneasy to manage
We had very labour intensive publishing processes
Users prepared documents/information (content)
Web master took the content, developed pages and deployed it on test
Users had to validate it in the test environment
Web master had to deploy it in production
We had multiple publishing processes and they were error prone
We had a lot of duplicates between the Internet site and the Intranet site
Business people did not really own the content. IT did
We had to start a very expensive re-branding project

We then defined the following targets:
Chose a tool that will let us
Simplify the publishing processes
Give to business people the ownership of the Intranet/Internet content
Publish the same information on different sites
Define different look and feels (e.g. Intranet different that Internet)
Easily manage and publish documents
Easily validate the content

Why having chosen Magnolia
The choice was made in 2005
With the following main constraints
Very limited budget -> Focused on Open Source solutions
Had to integrate well with our J2EE based environment
Support Multi-site publication
I have rejected all the XML/XSL based CMS
Based on standards
JCR170
J2EE
Ease of use. More intuitive than other tools
Ease of installation
Very flexible programming model
This eased the integration with our existing applications

Offered professional support
Swiss based product
Why not encouraging a local Open Source product?
Ease of contact
Operating within the same business hours than us
They were able to immediately provide a Senior developer to help us
We finally choosed their professional offer.

Magnolia Usage
Intranet
100% managed by Magnolia
2000 pages
3000 documents
35 contributors
4 content validators
Including
“ Blog like” news system
Help desk web site
Financial Markets Web Site
Containing all the investment advices, analysis, performance reports, ...
Internal control web site
Shared information/documents with Internet
“ Wiki like”. Simple pages/site management using Magnolia
Image galleries

Magnolia Usage
Public Internet Web site (http://www.lloydstsb-ipb.com/w3/en/home)
100% managed with Magnolia
Multi-languages
Products & Offers
Contacts
Branches
Private Internet Web site
Web content and documents are managed with Magnolia
News
Special product offers
Product factsheets
Financial information
Results
Investment policies

Publishing to multiple web sites
Using Magnolia publishing mechanism we can publish the different information to different sites at the same time.
This is true for documents/content that has to be published both
To the Intranet
To the public Web site
To the private Web site
This is also true for recommendations given to the clients via the private Web site. The same information is published both:
To the Intranet
To the Private Web site
Our product offers are published both:
To the Intranet
To the Private Web site

Multi-languages Internet web site

Reusing/Sharing the information
Using Magnolia we can centralize the access to the most meaningful information
Relationship managers now have a direct access to
Product information
Analysis
Recommended products
Investment policies
News
These documents are managed by Magnolia and easily made available
Full integration (documents or services)
Contributors regularly update the information
This information is used to provide better information/recommendations to the clients

Benefits of using Magnolia
Simplification of the publication processes
One single repository of information
Shared documents: Intranet/Internet/Private Internet
Users now own the business content
Business people can now update the business content without the help of the IT department
Because of Magnolia’s flexibility we have been able to provide different kind of support to the users
Web pages / Portal
Document management
News
Wiki
Easy to use

Challenges
Mainly on the IT side
Need very good IT skills (Java, Web)
Need for more documentation
Product evolving quickly
Need to adapt to the changes. Not always easy to change too often in a big company
More infrastructure management than expected
This is getting much better with the latest releases
We are a big company with specialized departments (IT infrastructure, IT Development, …). IT Infrastructure had to understand how to manage Magnolia.
Users now own the content and are fully involved in the publishing process.
The challenge is not to use Magnolia, but to understand the process.

Best practices
Focusing on users
By making sure they have a good understanding of what “Web” or “web content management” really means
By training them to Magnolia and Web Content Management
Use of Magnolia must be made easy
By providing trainings and documentation
By providing appropriate templates
By getting feedbacks and assessing the way they work
Avoid misuses or misunderstandings (e.g. html formatting is not MSWord formatting)
Make them understand what they are responsible for (content) and what the Webmaster is responsible for (pages, navigation, templates, layouts, …)
Monitoring site evolution
Users don’t understand the impacts of their activity on the overall system. Don’t let sites grow without management.
Being proactive with users
Magnolia provides the flexibility to adapt to user needs and offer very rich information.

Best practices
Defining new business processes
New actors (not Web master centric as it was before)
User’s part of the process becomes more important, IT part becomes less important
Defining a scalable architecture
Support site growth (number of pages, number of documents, number of users) and new needs
It is going to grow faster than expected
Integrating with Magnolia
Magnolia to be used for Web Content Management
Other applications must reuse Magnolia but don’t have to be based on Magnolia
Carefully planning the migration to new Magnolia releases
This can be a very lengthy process (especially with a huge amount of pages and a big number of users to be migrated). You may should consider being helped by Magnolia people to do that.
Letting the Webmaster be free to innovate
To benefit from flexibility

Best practices
Do not under estimate the infrastructure workload
Machines availability, backup, number of sites, security aspects
Monitoring the changes
Keep informed of the releases
Keep informed of the new features
Implement the most important releases (but not all)
Keeping it simple

Best practices – For Open Source solution providers
When wanting to be used by big companies
Sticking to the standards (J2EE standards in this case)
E.g: JSR 170
Your products must run on the industry standard platforms
E.g: Running on IBM Websphere, with an Oracle database
Offering professional support
Must be easy to use
Must be easy to install
Keep in mind that your product will be subject to a stronger validation process than a non open source product
Sticking to the standard and running on standard platform becomes a real plus
Making a real effort on documentation

Questions and Answers

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Lloyds TSB International Private Banking manages content with Magnolia

by Boris Kraft on Mar 13, 2009

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Lloyds TSB International Private Banking manages content with Magnolia — Presentation Transcript