VYRE: Company - Customer Details


Simmin - Case Study
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Siminn

Siminn; The Icelandic equivalent of BT has purchased VYRE Unify to run all of their websites. Siminn recently launched two award winning sites specific to their TV channels and an intranet.

Business Overview

Website: www.siminn.com or www.siminn.co.uk

Siminn provides telecommunication, mobile and internet services to private and corporate clients in Iceland. It's range of services and solutions includes fixed and mobile subscriptions as well as Live TV, broadband/DSL and Centrex network solutions.

Siminn's prime market is Iceland but the company has been growing in recent years and now has subsidiaries in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the UK. Over 1000 employees work for Siminn alone and another 900 for Siminn's subsidiaries.

Project Objective and Requirements

The overall objective of the project was to find and implement a content management solution that would support all of Siminn's requirements and allow a seamless transfer of the then existing website and intranet to the new platform.

Siminn was looking for a content management solution, which would allow the management of its public facing website, intranet, product catalogue and guidelines on the Siminn intranet and a reseller extranet.

Siminn needed to manage:

  • A dynamic public facing website with over 15,000 content items
  • An access controlled intranet for around 1000 internal users
  • A product catalogue and guidelines on Siminn's intranet and a reseller extranet

Siminn needed a solution that could easily scale with increased traffic and high load. The new system had to support open web standards (such as XHTML, XML / XSLT, RSS / Atom, CSS2), therefore allowing the web team to self service the implementation of new features and develop the site even further in the future.

It was also important to support the integration of other web based solutions in order to minimize the number of different user interfaces that Siminn staff need to access on a daily basis.

VYRE Solution

Siminn chose VYRE Unify as it best satisfied their requirements. VYRE technology not only supports open standards, but also has an inbuilt portal framework for integration with JSR-168 portlets. The support for open standards gives the Siminn web team maximum autonomy and control by removing the reliance on bespoke programming, and the support of JSR-168 portlets means that compatible web applications can easily be integrated into the sites Siminn builds with VYRE Unify.

Furthermore, data and file stores within VYRE Unify provide an easy and fast way of re-purposing items and hence managing them.

VYRE's partner and reseller in Iceland, TM Software/Origo, did the majority of the implementation work in co-operation with Siminn's web team.

This included:

  • Building portlets
  • Transferring data between the old and new systems
  • Creating an initial data structure within VYRE

Benefits / Success

VYRE has enabled Siminn to completely change the structure of their website and the web tree.

As a result:

  • Information is now easily and quickly re-purposed and reused on the website, the company intranet or extranet
  • Quality of information has considerably improved since Siminn is now maintaining the information in one place instead of several different places as was the case in the past
  • Look ups in the Product Catalogue have also increased fivefold within the first year after implementation

Since the implementation of VYRE Unify, the Siminn web team have also found it to be an easy and straightforward system to manage. This is thanks to the following out-of-the box features of VYRE Unify:

  • Built-in templates
  • Data and file stores
  • Approval processes

For example, the built in templates ensure consistent presentation of information. Furthermore, Siminn has 40 staff members providing content on the sites and the introduction of Unify and the new approval process for publishing information has helped to reduce workload and ensure higher quality.

Finally, the search features for both the Product Catalogue and the Customer Support sections of the website have been vastly improved (taxonomy search, search word, list), and information has been dynamically linked using VYRE's taxonomy function.

Awards received

www.siminn.com was selected as one of five best business sites of the year in 2005.

Future

Siminn has just released an improved Customer Support site which should see a decline in calls to the customer support centre. Future additions to the site will include:

  • More functionality using portlets
  • Even better use of data and file store features in VYRE
  • Improve search features