A common platform for all press information within the V&S Group

It is an extensive task for the information departments of V&S to publish press releases to the large number of public and internal web sites within the group. Iteam developed a distributed platform based on Web Services communication that ties together all the content management systems of the V&S Group. The users manage press releases and related information through a very easy-to-grasp and pedagogic interface with advanced help functions implemented in AJAX.

Within the V&S Group there is about 50 public web sites that could potentially offer their visitors press release. It is however a cumbersome task for the information departments to publish a press release to all those sites. Not only are they large in numbers, they are also built on different web content management platforms; most on the Swedish .NET-based platform EPiServer and German RedDot, but some also on custom-made platforms and static files published using FTP. To facilitate this task Iteam was commissioned to develop a group-common platform to support both creating press releases and automatically handle publishing to multiple web sites and other digital channels.

The solution – V&S Press Room – is a distributed platform whose different subsystems communicate using Web Services. The most important such subsystem is the completely .NET-based central storage, that handles user authentication, publishing and workflow. Each web site that receives press releases from the press room has its own web service to handle communication with the central system and translates the information to a form manageable by the receiving content management platform. This architecture makes it easy to expand the system with new receiving sites without changing the central system.

Web sites that offer the editor and management tools for the press room does this using an AJAX-based interface whose logic is retrieved from the central system, which means that each web site administrator doesn't have to implement or adapt anything of their own. A lot of focus has been put into making the input as easy to use as possible. With modern AJAX technology the system helps the user along way, for instance by automatically retrieving information from other systems (such as the V&S contact database) and by adapting the users input to the pre-defined templates.