The Premiership is a highly competitive environment and Fulham Football Club decided to redevelop their website in order to get closer to their fans. In order to deliver an experience that was always fresh, relevant and up to date, they wished to streamline the process of content provision and delivery through the acquisition of a content management system. After an exhaustive evaluation and selection process Contensis R4 was seen as the best fit and beat off competition from established suppliers in the sports market.
The system was seen to be easy to use and it's proven ability to integrate with other online applications was a key factor.
If the objectives for the CRM strategy were to be achieved, the Club needed a system that allowed the Club web team to respond quickly to seasonal demand fluctuations and reflect changes in product and service offerings. This also meant that the CMS had to fully separate the content from the look and feel of the site and enable Club staff to make rapid site-wide changes when necessary.
In order to deliver their vision, the Club website needed a fresh new design and tight integration with a suite of new online applications. These included an online ticketing system, a web-shop, a mobile service and an external news feed which provided public website visitors with a running commentary; something unique in the Premiership.
The Contensis professional services team were employed to lead and manage the integration process in order to ensure that the functionality of the disparate systems would be maximised and seamlessly embedded in the overall solution.
It is worth noting that one of the most common causes for web development projects running into difficulties is the number of suppliers involved in the project; particularly when combined with very tight timeframes. It was key that a close working relationship was maintained between all the suppliers in order ensure that the Fulham website would be delivered in time for the new season as planned.
The Fulham FC project demonstrates that Contensis with its .NET framework and open API is an ideal choice where in-depth integration with multiple applications is required. The provision of an easy to use interface ensures that non-technical users do not have anything complicated to learn, leading to enthusiastic take-up of the system.
About the company
The Contensis Enterprise Content Management suite of products began life, as many products do, following an animated discussion between a group of software professionals back in the autumn of 1998.
They all agreed, after exhaustive evaluation, that most of the products then available fell far short of their own vision and an idea began to gel. By spring 1999 work was well advanced on the specification of a system which not only met their criteria, and that of respected industry analysts, but equally important also reflected the views of end user enterprises. Power, ease of use and cost effectiveness were the key words. The beginnings of the Contensis development team were spawned a little later and work started in earnest to turn the dream into reality.
Philosophy
Our approach is completely customer-centric. Customers are our universe and we see their problems as our problems.
From a software perspective this means that we strive to ensure that every aspect of Contensis is simple to learn and easy to use. We believe we've achieved that, certainly at everyday user level. Even newcomers to the system are normally editing and contributing within minutes.
It's all part of our 'How can we make it simpler' approach.
About Contensis Enterprise CMS
Built using the Microsoft® .Net platform Contensis ECMS features an open API that facilitates easy and rapid integration with virtually any application, and is completely intuitive to use at every level.
One of the very few CMS solutions that combines the best of dynamic and flat file publishing, it has proved itself in the most demanding of circumstances and is fully scalable.