Content Management & The Enterprise: Teck.com

Over the next few weeks I will answer the question "Who actually uses a CMS & why?" by covering a few Point Dynamics CMS success stories. Our first stop is Vancouver, Canada to visit teck.com the internet home of Teck, a diverse company with locations worldwide and a focus on "copper, metallurgical coal, zinc, gold and energy."

The company had a customized external website that was difficult to update and maintain. They wanted a dynamic, multi-lingual site that could be managed by a non-technical person or persons. Additionally, they required several customizations for sections such as Job Listings, News Releases, Stock Displays & Graphs.

Point Dynamics CMS was chosen because it was the only vendor and product which met all of the company's very specific needs:

1. Affordable
2. Fully customizable and extensible system
3. Easy, repeatable web page creation process for non-IT staff
4. No internal IT resources needed for implementation
5. Ability to display content in a language local to the user
6. Content had to be secured by non-IT staff and fully searchable
7. Vendor support throughout the process

The Teck.com implementation required several customizations to the base implementation to turn a generic web site into an enterprise portal: a destination for internal users, external customers, and prospective employees.

A "Careers" section was created for prospective employees and existing employees seeking a change of position or location. It provides the ability to search for open positions by keyword, location, and/or job category.

The "Media" section is populated via a "News Release" component with an easy to use interface to add news stories with a downloadable PDF version of the story. The actual stories are displayed in a list format with a "Read More" link which navigates to a details page for that story. Using the "News Release" component, press releases are scheduled and archived as needed.

The last Teck customization was the "Stock Display" component. This component shows Teck's current trade information on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges.

Localization is accomplished not by creating multiple sites but by creating translated content on the fly as pages are developed. In other words, the same web page is used to re-purpose the same content in a different language! The content manager determines when content will be made available in a different language; each web page displays a default language until a translation is available and is published by the content manager.

Point Dynamics CMS allowed Teck to turn the management of their international website over to one Content Manager who has since created hundreds of pages and redesigned the entire site more than once (and thanks to a template-driven design process, this can be accomplished in moments rather than months).