Custom CMS and Intranet for Philips Pronto

Comprehensive solution customized to the Customer’s unique business processes
Scalable and secure CMS supporting the entire publishing workflow
Rich web portal with advanced collaboration and community features

Expertise

Collaboration Solutions

Content & Document Management

Verticals

Manufacturing

When the Customer realized the content management system of their web site got outdated, slow and inconvenient to use, they decided to ask help from Iflexion.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Solution
Results
Customer Voice

Context

Philips Pronto, a division of Philips that produces and sells a family of high-end touch-screen remote controls, had an outdated custom-made content management system, which required some serious technical skills to manage their website. Philips wanted to make the work with online content easy and convenient for non-technical personnel, as well as improve the scalability of the CMS.

Phillips business processes were quite unique and couldn’t be covered by any readymade solution available on the market, and when Iflexion suggested custom development, it turned out to be a more cost-effective solution, due to the absence of any license costs associated with CMS implementation.

Iflexion provided an estimate, video demonstrations of a suggested open source CMS, and its demo installations to let Philips Pronto get a feel of the future solution and its functionality.

Solution

The goal of the project was to develop a custom CMS and a portal on it. The portal presents up-to-date information about Pronto departments (news, events, product descriptions), as well as allows users to download and upload firmware. Iflexion created a content management system based on open source Java OpenCMS, which enables easy content publishing, editing, and change preview and rollback. The portal built on top of the CMS consists of structured content with right-based access, custom dynamic modules, and community features such as a forum, upload ratings, and a secure permission-based file downloading service. The system is scalable to support the growing amount of users.

Frontend Functionality

The front-end site is presented as a set of pages fully editable via the back office system.

General CMS features (publishing workflow, content access levels, templates integration, sitemap, navigation management)
User Management (users administration, registration, login, profile)
Content Areas (distributor finder, service, testimonials, use-cases, maintenance, installers, events, news, products)
Examination module (users pass tests depending on their access level)
Custom modules (upload new modules as binary files, categorize, rate, search, rights-based download)
File Sharing Module, information request forms and FAQ section
Integration with a 3-rd party forum and WebTrain system
Links to external systems, e. g. marketing tools

Backend Functionality

The back-office site is available for website administrators only. It has the following basic modules:

Static pages management module
Users management module
Structured content editing and change preview
Publishing workflows
Content access levels module

Results

The first version of the CMS with main functionality was available in record-breaking one month after the start of the development. As soon as it was ready, the development team deployed it to a remote staging server on the customer side, so its employees were able to immediately use the system. Additional customer benefit was that we already had a synergistic team for OpenCMS, including a manager, an analyst, developers, and testers, which greatly facilitated the development process.

After the success of this project, the adjacent Philips B2B division Home Control, which produces regular branded remote controls in batches on behalf of world-known brands, made a similar request for a system to manage their web portal. The implementation of their CMS was faster and more productive due to the reuse of modules developed during the previous Philips project. Moreover, Philips already had a good understanding of the system, so only budget and time estimates were necessary.