Sesame Workshop - Alfresco Credit Crunch Innovation Awards 2009 - North America Commercial Sector
Category: North America Commercial Sector
Winner: Sesame Workshop
Industry: Entertainment/Education
Geography: USA
Summary of project and achievements:
Complete rebuild of www.sesamestreet.org and www.sesameworkshop.org websites. These serve the mission of the company and the show, Sesame Street, by using a dynamic content based CMS.
Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project:
Need to create an automated rich internet site with limited budget to meet the needs across all business units in the company to communicate to our multiple audiences.
Please describe why you choose Alfresco. Were you using a different solution previously? If so, why did you change?
We chose Alfresco because of its ability to handle our content and integrate with our other solutions. Previously, site was done manually in PHP and was very outdated and hard to manage.
Describe the solution/service/web site you built using Alfresco:
We built the content repositories for www.sesamestreet.org for children and families and www.sesameworkshop.org for donors, partners, and businesses 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:
3 Alfresco servers running on SLES 10.2 with MySQL connected to Liferay and OpenX for presentation layers and Lucene for search. Site handles millions of uniques per month.
Did you work with a certified Alfresco partner? If so, please name them and describe your experience:
We worked with Cignex Technologies. Their Alfresco work was wonderful and adapted perfectly to our content needs.
What value did you gain from implementing Alfresco and how did this impact your business?
Time to market: Allows us to publish games and videos within days instead of months.
Cost reductions: Reduced external payments for development of pages and creation by over $100k per year.
Service delivery improvements: Went from manual monthly updates to automated weekly updates.
What sorts of “soft” benefits do you have (collaboration, ease of use, flexibility of deployment and access, etc.)?
Much easier to maintain allowing us to use internal staff instead of hiring external companies to develop and test our content. Also allowed for immediate updates and rollouts of new games and videos where before it took months.
What advice do you have for other companies facing a similar business challenge?
Understand your scope and interoperability and make sure you have appropriate buy in from all levels.
