View more case studies >
Featured Case Study - Deployment & Migration
Ontario Real Estate Association (OREA) is designed to help Ontario Realtors, Member Boards and Associations succeed. Representing over 50,000 brokers and salespeople throughout the Ontario region, OREA serves its members through a wide variety of publications, educational programs and special services. The association is also responsible for providing all real estate licensing courses in Ontario.
In 2011 OREA contracted Toronto based Prescient Digital Media to help them organize and prepare for a major website redesign and the deployment of a .NET Web CMS solution. OREA, through their web consulting agency contacted Falcon-Software in April 2011 to request a .NET Web CMS bid proposal for a multiple CMS vendor integration project. The vendors OREA & Prescient Digital selected to evaluate were Elcom, EPiServer, Kentico and Sitecore.
“One of the key advantages of requesting a bid from Falcon-Software is that they were the only trained and certified integrator in North America able to deploy all four of the vendors we selected”, stated Robert Jarovi, Senior Consultant at Prescient Digital Media.
Falcon-Software with locations in Dallas, Seattle and Victoria, believes there is no one size fits all CMS platform on the market today that can provide the best solution for everyone's requirements. For example, some clients may require a strong e-commerce or robust social media application. Others may require a system that excels in site globalization or mobile application features. Or you may need a CMS system that can seamlessly integrate with an ERP or CRM solution.
Regardless, Falcon-Software feels that being limited in offering only one or two CMS vendor solutions, objectivity becomes seriously compromised.
If you take a deeper look, you will find that most of the top CMS vendors on the market today all promote user-friendly interfaces, customizable workflows, online forms, reporting analytics, e-commerce and social media modules – the similarities are vast. But the key technique in recommending and deploying the best .NET CMS solution for any organization is having a clear understanding of CMS vendor’s core differentiators and having the experience in deploying the most complex project requirements using their software.
After OREA & Prescient Digital completed a thorough review of Falcon-Software’s RFP response and onsite product demonstrations from all four vendors, they finally selected Falcon-Software to deploy a Sitecore Web CMS solution to help them achieve their goal of having a robust website with a focus on increases their organizational effectiveness online.
Original Website:
OREA's Needs
- Create a more dynamic, visually appealing website design.
- Improve information architecture and navigation to be more user-centric.
- Improve content quality: up-to-date, relevant, dynamic.
- Offer online feedback mechanisms.
- Add multimedia capability.
- Add capability to better educate the students about OREA’s courses and to complement their existing studies.
- Enhance e-commerce functionality to facilitate easier transactions.
- Improve self-service capability.
- Improve search: more relevant results and more advanced search options.
- Increase FAQ documentation.
Project Challenges
- The project had very tight deadlines and there were a number of external parties to attend with as well as many different people involved in various departments within OREA.
- Great amount of highly technical challenges, like integration with 3rd party applications.
- Large quantity of existing data to migrate with new content being created at same time.
- Advanced search functionality, including highlighting text inside PDF files.
Falcon-Software's Solution:
A very strict schedule had to be put in place and the project was organized in different phases to meet their deadlines. Priorities played a big part in the decision making and different solution alternatives and time frames were provided during implementation. Meetings here held at different levels: business meetings with consultants to define scope and requirements, technical meetings between developers at Falcon-Software and the OREA IT Department, and meetings with OREA different groups for in-depth requirements and additional features/issues they wanted to solve.
The authentication to the secure area had a number of technical difficulties, because of the CRM systems involved, and the validations through external sites. There were a number of other additional and diverse applications that the new website needed to tap into for content, like course calendars and descriptions, reports, enrollment. Each of this was addressed on an individual basis. The solutions involved using different APIs, iFrames and also security protocols.
An important component was the migration of large amounts of information into the new site. Structured information scripts were created to automate the process, but a number of challenges had to be solved: issues with links, redirects and migrating information into a new content structure.
Due to the large number of visitors to the site, a robust an efficient Search functionality was of high importance. The solution provided by the Falcon-Software team included the implementation of custom code that extended the functionality by including different types of documents and visual enhancements for the end user.
The End Result
For the Web CMS solution, Falcon-Software used Sitecore’s enterprise-level .NET software that enables highly complex functionality to be built into websites, while allowing anyone with computer knowledge to add and change website content. OREA’s new website is easier to navigate and displays information in a more accessible and interactive format, increasing their audience engagement.
New Website
Falcon-Software offers website planning, creative design, development, Ektron, Elcom, EPiServer, Kentico, SharePoint, Sitecore, and Sitefinity implementations, CMS training and server hosting services. We invite you to get started today. Call us for a free consultation at 800-957-1126 or complete our Consultation Request Form.