Hostway's Zope Solution Connects With Customers
Hostway Corporation provides the industry's premier web hosting services, tools and support. Through their web site (http://www.hostway.com) Hostway attracts new customers and provides important services for existing clients.
As their business grew, the static publishing system that was previously in use was becoming too inflexible to accommodate the business goals of the site, and Hostway recognized the need to move to a dynamic platform to best serve its internal business users and customers.
"Using Zope Corporation to enhance our web platform was an attractive option for us, because the flexibility and the Open Source nature of the software allowed for easier integration, as well as easier project collaboration between the two groups involved. This is important when you are building capabilities such as a rule-based personalization engine, for which Zope clearly understood our expectations, and delivered in a timely and cost effective manner", said David Lee, the project head for Hostway Corporation.
Web Publishing Bottleneck Solved by Zope
Zope Provides the Platform Now and For The Future
A Zope-based solution enables Hostway to collaborate effectively and provide its customers with up-to-date information and tailored service offerings.
The Hostway Web site has several focused goals. The site provides support and other services for existing customers, as well as detailed information on service offerings for prospective customers. To achieve these goals, many people must work together to keep the site up to date.
The old system suffered from the traditional "Web publishing bottleneck." Many content producers overwhelmed the few with the technical know-how to actually publish content. This made the content production and QA process difficult.
Hostway turned to Zope Corporation to quickly develop and deliver a solution that would allow their content producers to work together smoothly and according to well-defined workflows. Content producers are now able to publish content quickly while maintaining quality control and without burdening technical staff.
A Zope Solution That Connects With Customers
Hostway Leads Web Hosting Service Sector
The Hostway site plays an important role in attracting and informing potential new customers. The old static system made it difficult to react quickly to maximize appeal to potential customers and required technical staff to get involved for every change. To better serve its customer base, Hostway decided to build a content management and personalization system. In Zope Corporation, Hostway found the optimal partner for this endeavor.
The Zope-based content management solution developed for Hostway includes a powerful rules-based personalization system. The personalization engine allows non-technical business people to personalize practically any area of the site using a simple "point-and-click" Web interface. Personalization rules can take into account a visitor's history on the site as well as information from back-end systems.
This system provides Hostway with incredible flexibility in targeting offerings to customers, and allows them to quickly respond to customer needs. The personalization engine also allows for user session patterns to flow back into back-end systems, allowing future personalization campaigns to be even more effective. Ultimately, Hostway's visitors and customers are better served through timely, personalized content.
Time Is Of The Essence
The rapid-development capabilities of the Zope platform allowed Hostway to deploy their content management solution in a fraction of the time that would be required for other solutions. The Open Source Zope and CMF platform will continue to provide benefits in the future as Hostway continues to innovate with its Web presence.
Challenges
- Enable secure collaboration on site content between internal content producers working in different roles
- Provide "point and click" site personalization by non-programmer business maintainers of the site
- Easily integrate with back-end business systems such as pricing and customer information and sales lead data
- Provide customers with constantly up-to-date information on service offerings
Approach
- A Zope-based content management solution, integrating back end systems, structured content management and powerful rules-based personalization
Benefits
- Content producers can collaborate easily and securely on site content
- Ability to target service offerings based on history and back-end information
- Business managers can react quickly to tailor offerings to customers
- Integration with back-end business systems
- Fast time-to-implementation
- Low total cost of ownership
Zope is superior to other content management solutions provided
by the competition because of its object-oriented nature,
allowing rapid development via code reuse and extension of proven
functional modules.
- Bob Corriher, Director of Web Engineering, P-Wave Inc.