In May Pentia won the possibility to relaunch Forbrugestyrelsens (the National Consumer Agency of Denmark’s) 3 websites (www.forbrugerstyrelsen.dk, www.forbrugerombudsmanden.dk and www.forbrug.dk) in Sitecore CMS. One of the reasons why we were chosen to undertake the project was because we could clearly demonstrate in the selection process that we have the skills and experience necessary to develop, manage and deliver such a complex web solution to the agreed quality within the tight timeframe and specific budget.
Two of the main requirements for the project are to create a solution that can enable content to be managed and presented based on a relational structure as well as Sitecore’s hierarchical structure, whilst ensuring that the solution is very simple to upgrade to future versions of Sitecore. To meet these requirements we will design a special function that is built on top of Sitecore. This will enable relational management of content, without compromising the core Sitecore solution and thereby ensuring it is easy to upgrade in the future. Another benefit of not compromising Sitecore is that Forbrugestyrelsen can take advantage of the many functions that Sitecore delivers as standard.
In the new solution, editors have no need to consider placement of content, as this is determined by the system based on what topics and metadata are assigned to the article. The administrator has the possibility to change and manipulate the presentation of the content retrieved from the assigned index(es) to a specific content area. This gives the time saving benefit of having a fully automated system with the flexibility benefit of a manual system.
As content is created, stored and managed in a “silo” structure as opposed to a traditional page- based hierarchical structure, creation of navigation elements, such as breadcrumbs, sitemaps etc becomes far more challenging. To achieve this each navigational component will be created from scratch with logic that ensures the system delivers practical navigation for the user based on the context of the content they are interacting with.
Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS) is to be used to enable delivery of “Most read” lists and tracking of user behavior regarding reviews. The site delivers functions that engage the user such as commenting and reviewing articles with the opportunity for users to add their own links to articles.
Google Mini is used to deliver site search results while Lucene is used for indexing the content in the relational structure function.
One other major task in the project is the conversion of the current websites 7000+ pages. Originally Forbrugestyrelsen had planned to undertake this manually, which will require many man hours. However, as to meet similar requirements in the past, we have developed a conversion tool that will enable the conversion of the majority of the content automatically, reducing the manual labor to quality assurance and adjustment only, saving Forbrugestyrelsen a great deal of time and uninteresting work.
There are many other features such as newletter management, RSS, automatic publishing, archiving and all the websites will be work across all modern browsers and adhere to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines AA standard.
To ensure that the correct level of quality is delivered within the assigned timeframe and budget, we will follow our own project management best practice tightly based on PRINCE2. In the first phase of the project, the goal is to create the Accept Criteria for the solution. These are measureable criteria that the final solution will be assessed against on delivery. These are not static and are open to change throughout the project; however changes can affect the timeframe and budget for project. Normally the Accept Criteria would be baselined before starting the following phases. However, as the timeframe is very tight, we will overlap the clarification phase with the following architecture and development phases so we can start developing fundamental components as quickly as possible. Although overlapping the phases creates an overhead for the project the benefit of being able to meet the deadline, clearly outweighs the overhead.
For the development phase we will follow our best practice for development, which is tightly based on Scrum. At the end of each development sprint, Forbrugestyrelsen will be presented with the work-in-progress solution, so they can view and test completed functionality and ensure that development is proceeding according to their expectations. The development method enables the project manager to have a constant overview of progress against timeframe and budget, so Forbrugestyrelsen are always aware of the status of the project.