Building an 'Infrastructure' for Web Publishing

by Marvin Pyles

In early 2001, Todd Johns — IT manager of the U.S.-based division of Fortis, the international financial services giant — began researching content management products. Johns led a team that developed a list of requirements and then created a list of 34 products under consideration.

In the end, Mediasurface, from the London- and New York-based company of the same name, became the system of choice for the company's U.S. intranet."One of the big reasons we chose Mediasurface is that it appeared to be a good value," says Johns. "[Mediasurface] matched our requirements more closely than any other product, and we liked the fact that it offered an open architecture and wasn't something incredibly proprietary. [It] also had good client references."

Now in its 4.0 release, Mediasurface incorporates three main components: a workflow/rules engine, a content repository and a presentation layer. Mediasurface also includes tools for content integration, distribution across multiple servers and reporting; and the system supports XML content, Web-based content entry, version control and user/group permissions.

Fortis is a large organization with 75,000 employees across two continents. It owns multiple companies, each offering several insurance products. In the United States, each company has Internet and intranet Web sites hosted centrally at the company's New York office. The intranet hosts more than 200 corporate and departmental sites, most of which publish procedural manuals and internal documentation.

Before Mediasurface, Fortis had largely static content. As many companies have experienced, management problems multiplied as the number of sites and the amount of content increased. Information was often incorrect or outdated, which created operational issues internally and led to support calls.

"We had grown from a brochure site [simply describing products] to a more sophisticated site with content supporting our agents," says Johns. "As content grew, the static HTML way of doing things started to create challenges concerning the way people could contribute to a Web site."

The problem wasn't just keeping content current, Johns says, it was managing all changes — application, infrastructure and hardware. The company had to make sure that a change to one application didn't affect others.

"The challenge of a centralized intranet is to create an infrastructure that can be shared across multiple businesses," says Johns. "Our driver is to leverage economies of scale. Sometimes seven or eight different companies use the infrastructure, and they probably could not afford [this technology] on their own."

Using Mediasurface, content is defined by type, such as articles or press releases. Each type has predefined attributes — such as title, author's name and body text — and associated multimedia items — such as images and audio files. Also, a type can have predefined relationships to other types. For example, a press release could have related links to articles containing specific metadata.The content types defined in the system have an associated workflow to facilitate publishing as well as access control levels to determine who can create, edit and access that content.

By early 2002, Fortis had rolled out a modest Mediasurface deployment for the intranet. The staging and production servers include separate instances of Mediasurface. Apache proxy servers control and navigate the flow of traffic to Mediasurface. Two separate Oracle databases act as content repositories.

According to Johns, content creators "scattered throughout America" formerly had to understand HTML and use Microsoft FrontPage to contribute content. These contributors now use Mediasurface templates within their Web browsers. Workflows have been designed to obtain required approvals from marketing, management and legal teams. More than 250 people are currently contributing content through the system, but that number is expected to increase by as much as 25 percent this year, says Johns. Johns estimates that about 14,000 U.S. employees can access the Mediasurface-managed intranet.

In Johns' experience, the best features of Mediasurface are its Java-based entry forms for content contributors and the "quick and intuitive" wizards that allow administrators to create content types and workflows. The Content Management Console, new in the December 2001 4.0 release, automatically generates the Java-based entry forms that allow users to add, update, delete or sign-off on content.

As for weaknesses, Johns points to the product's Perl API. If a separate application server such as BEA Web Logic is used, pages are called directly from Mediasurface using JSP or Java servlets. If there is no application server, Mediasurface serves pages through its Content Server, which requires custom Perl code embedded within the presentation templates. Johns says the Perl API presented a learning curve for Fortis administrators, but he also adds that it is "extensive and powerful."

Future plans call for the Mediasurface system to handle management of the Fortis Internet sites, but that will have to wait for a site redesign and a broader rollout on the intranet. For now, the system is providing an affordable Web publishing infrastructure for scores of Fortis business units located throughout North America.