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Client The Christian Science Monitor is an international daily newspaper published Monday through Friday. Founded in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, it's now also a multimedia website, an e-mail edition, a personal digital assistant (PDA) edition, and a downloadable PDF of the print version. Challenge An increasing emphasis on the web was pushing the Christian Science Monitor to invest significant efforts in to converging its print and web content. Seeking to deliver a more dynamic and interactive user experience, the organization set out to revamp its website, streamline its behind-the-scenes publishing process, and better control work flow. Improving the readability of story content and optimizing use of website space for advertising were also priorities. Hence, the organization sought a flexible web publishing solution that would extend control over the layout and plugability of website articles, images and other site components. A solution would also ideally provide a virtualized web page structure that would allow the editorial and publishing staff to anticipate needed changes, quickly refactor presentation of information, and better leverage reusable content assets. Lastly, the underlying desire for more flexibility and options inherently demanded a solution that would grow with the site and accommodate future business objectives. A proper solution, for example, would be able to handle increasing loads of content and highly fluctuating traffic scenarios characteristic of a press site. Because the project would include many new components, the Christian Science Monitor knew it would have to rely on a strong, collaborative team of both open source and proprietary vendors with integration expertise to ensure success. Resolution After reviewing several portal offerings, the Christian Science Monitor chose Liferay Portal for its ease of use, compatibility with Alfresco, and superior out of the box functionality. In particular, Liferay’s comprehensive collection of prebundled portlets differentiated it against other products on the market, both commercial and open source. Beyond these technical merits, the Christian Science Monitor also acknowledged the degree to which a network-based open source business model would foster transparency for open communication with their vendors. It was also attracted to Liferay’s company’s vision, which was well-aligned with its own non-profit /charitable mission. Involving a core team of developers and extensive interaction with the newsroom and publishing staff, the resulting web publishing portal quickly achieved the organization’s goals. - Content and publishing – Liferay Portal provided a platform on which content created on Alfresco’s content management system was easily aggregated. In collaboration with the Alfresco team, a custom portlet was created to pull content to tie neatly into Alfresco’s workflow.
- Layout and user interface – The first portal to offer drag and drop lay out functionality at that time, Liferay Portal gave Christian Science Monitor editors immense control over the redesign and layout of site content and articles.
- Personalization option – Beyond supporting the desired customer logins and personalization, Liferay Portal provided expanded functionality with the set of collaboration tools provided, providing a more dynamic and interactive user experience.
- Scalability – The scalability of Liferay Portal’s underlying architecture was put to the test shortly after deployment: The capture, holding and release of Jill Carol, a Monitor correspondent held hostage in Iraq prompted an exclusive 10 part series released each day for which the site easily served nearly 200,000 page views per hour during the site’s most active 8 hours of each day.
Looking forward, the Christian Science Monitor intends to remain active in Liferay’s community. Said Russ Danner, the Christian Science Monitor’s lead Architect on the portal implementation project: “We strongly believe in leveraging the expertise of our open source partners and community. Liferay has been evolving and innovating in the open source portal market for quite some time and the strength and maturity of its community is reflected in the maturity of the product’s features.”
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