Harvard Business Publishing - Alfresco Credit Crunch Innovation Awards 2009 - Overall Winner
Category: Overall winner and North America Commercial Sector
Winner: Harvard Business Publishing
Industry: Publishing
Geography: USA
Summary of project and achievements:
All Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) digital content is now managed by Alfresco ECM and WCM. We migrated away from proprietary, closed-source repositories to a more agile and open source Alfresco-based infrastructure for both enterprise content (i.e., Harvard Business Review magazine, Harvard Business Press books, Cases, etc.) and Web content for all of our websites. As a result, HBP has unleashed content across the enterprise resulting in improved employee productivity, faster digital product development, improved Web content production cycles, more revenue generation opportunities, and lower operating costs.
Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project:
Key to the success of HBP is the ability to quickly and easily leverage content across all publishing divisions, to develop new digital media products, to produce rich Web content, and to expand revenue generation opportunities. To accomplish this, HBP business end-users must be able to harness enterprise content from disparate divisional sources. To facilitate access to its high-value content across all divisions, HBP recognized that it needed to transition from its existing collection of disparate systems—which consisted of a legacy, proprietary ECM system (which housed most of the digital enterprise content) and shared network drives—to a consolidated yet flexible solution that offered the agility HBP required to unlock content across the enterprise and to streamline content publishing to multiple channels including print, mobile, and the Web.
Please describe why you chose Alfresco. Were you using a different solution previously? If so, why did you change?
Previous solution was a combination of a proprietary, closed source ECM system and several department-specific network shared drives. Alfresco was chosen as the single, consolidated platform for both enterprise and web content management. The main reasons were: - Robust content modeling capability, to accommodate the numerous content types at HBP ranging from Harvard Business Press books and book chapters, Harvard Business Review articles, Higher Education Cases, and Harvard Business Digital articles, blogs, podcasts and videos. - Ease of use for ECM – Alfresco Explorer for administrators, a custom user interface developed to tailor the experience for business users, and CIFS for familiar shared drive access. All controlled via role-based security. - For WCM, important features were strong multi-user authoring and versioning model, in-context preview, and the decoupled architecture that provided us with the flexibility to develop a Web content delivery system that was best suited to our needs. - Ease of integration, as we needed to integrate our content infrastructure with numerous enterprise systems including ERP, eCommerce, taxonomy management, print production and workflow systems, syndicated feeds, a blogging platform, among others. - Lower Cost – Alfresco provides enterprise-class capability at a relatively low cost of ownership.
Describe the solution/service/web site you built using Alfresco:
We implemented two separate but related solutions: ECM and WCM. For the ECM solution, we built a custom ECM application on the Alfresco document management repository for management of all enterprise product-related content, consisting of over 1 million content objects. The most important features of our ECM application include rapid search and retrieval of any and all types of content, modeling of rich metadata and content relationships, content browsing and navigation, and content publishing support. For the WCM solution, we implemented Alfresco WCM to support the authoring/management of all Web content for all of our websites, including Harvard Business Review at hbr.org, and Harvard Business Digital at harvardbusiness.org. As part of this, we implemented a new web content delivery system based on JBoss that integrated nicely with Alfresco.
Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.). Please highlight the use of other open source software in the solution:
For content management, Alfresco ECM and WCM systems run on a pair of dual-CPU servers with 16 GB memory and running Red Hat Enteprise Linux. ECM and WCM run in separate containers because these applications have different end-users, different SLAs to the business, and different operational support processes. A SAN is used for shared, high-availability storage. A proprietary database is used, primarily due to ERP requirements. Other open source software includes JBoss, Spring, Apache Tomcat, and Mule.
Did you work with a certified Alfresco partner? If so, please name them and describe your experience:
Rivet Logic led the development of both the Alfresco ECM and WCM projects - from start to finish. Rivet Logic was outstanding in all regards – very deep technical understanding of all aspects of Alfresco, strong expertise in both enterprise and web content management, excellent software architects, developers and mentors, and fun to work with. They met or exceeded all of our expectations and requirements with regard to deliverables, schedule, and budget.
What value did you gain from implementing Alfresco and how did this impact your business (e.g. can you quantify improvements in any of these areas)?
Total cost of ownership (TCO): Lowered TCO with lower software costs, higher reliability, and less IT support costs.
Time to market: We have accelerated both our product development cycles and our web content publishing cycles.
Cost reductions: Lower software costs with open source, and lower IT support costs with a highly reliable, and more maintainable, system.
Revenue increases: Faster product development and website publishing means more revenue opportunities.
Service delivery improvements: Our Customer Support team provides faster, more responsive service now via access to our new ECM application.
What sorts of “soft” benefits do you have (collaboration, ease of use, flexibility of deployment and access, etc.)?
Improved collaboration now that all employees have access to the ECM application (subject to user roles and privileges); higher productivity with an easier to use, and more reliable, ECM and WCM system; and an extensible platform that will help HBP respond immediately to market needs.
What advice do you have for other companies facing a similar business challenge?
Enterprise-class open source ECM and WCM has arrived. Every organization needs to take a serious look at Alfresco (and Rivet Logic) if they want to get a better return on their content management infrastructure investment.
