Web Content Management Powers Highly Successful Partner, Customer, and Employee Portals
Documentum Customer Success Story
“In less than a year since spinning off from EMC, McDATA went from one partner to 75, with many more to follow. We needed a Web content management partner that could help us manage all the content associated with these new relationships. Other vendors addressed Web content management, but couldn’t scale to fit the needs of the enterprise. That is what sold us on Documentum.”Business Overview
McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT) is the expert provider of hardware, software, and services that enable partners and customers around the world to reduce the total cost of storage management today, and be ready to adapt to the real-time information demands of tomorrow. Established in over 8,000 data centers worldwide, McDATA solutions are at the heart of more than 80 percent of Fortune 100 storage network data centers, powering the latest e-business applications, customer databases, financial traffic, and other mission-critical data.Challenges
Formerly a part of EMC, McDATA was spun off and went through an IPO in August 2000. Prior to leaving EMC, McDATA focused exclusively on engineering and “OEMing” its products. On its own, the company began aggressively pursuing VARs and initiating a channel partner program. It recognized the need to expand its marketing initiatives and Web presence to meet these goals. Need to Provide Critical Information to Improve Relationships
After evaluating its own growth and strategic plans, McDATA determined that building several Web-based portals would be the best way to give its partners, customers, and employees better access to critical information. By providing an online resource, the company hoped to forge stronger relationships with its partners and customers and enable its employees to work more efficiently.
Need to Manage Wealth of Content, Not Just for Portals
According to Britt Hinnen, manager of Internet and productivity application support at McDATA, “The channel partners portal was the most strategic site for us. In one year since spinning off from EMC, we went from one partner to 75, with many more to follow. We needed a Web content management partner that could help us manage all the content associated with these new relationships.” McDATA needed a WCM solution that could scale to support an extensive amount of continually changing portal content.
In addition, McDATA generates a lot of content that does not end up on the Web but that still needs to be managed. Consequently, the ideal solution would need to manage Web content as well as other enterprise content not destined for portal publication.
Need to Better Leverage Existing Content to Increase Efficiency
McDATA also recognized that it could boost the efficiency of its Web publishing process by reusing content from its manuals, online help documents, marketing materials, and other documentation. Such content could be made available to partners and customers via the Web portals or to the company’s marketing and sales teams via the intranet. To reuse content easily, McDATA needed a solution with strong XML support.
Documentum Solution
McDATA chose the Documentum ECM platform to power its strategic portal initiatives and selected BEA WebLogic as its Web application server. McDATA rolled out the Documentum solution over three phases. First, the company built a partner relationship management portal for its resellers. As of late 2003, this portal managed content for 250 partners, with seven different partner program levels. In 2004, it is being expanded to serve OEMs as well. Cutting Publishing Time From Days to Hours
Using Documentum, McDATA built workflow templates to facilitate the daily tasks of its users. Automating content workflow and lifecycle processes streamlines the management of Web content and makes it effortless for the company’s content experts to contribute, edit, and publish content. Previously, all Web publishing was done by IT. Removing the IT bottleneck and streamlining publishing processes has reduced time to Web from a previous average of two to four days down to two to three hours. McDATA estimates that, by reducing the time required by IT and business users to manage content, the Documentum solution is reaping a return on investment of more than 500 percent.
Freeing Up IT to Focus on High-Value Tasks
According to Hinnen, “At McDATA, we have a lot of content creators, not a lot of HTML creators. Web Publisher lets IT get out of the publishing business and aligns the skill sets within the company where they should be.” Now IT can focus its energy on technology infrastructure support and other more value-added activities.
“Business owners manage their content now,” says Hinnen. “They’re even beginning to look beyond managing content to ways to improve and manage the portal as an entire entity.”
Strengthening Relationships with Access to Timely Information
By providing self-administration capabilities and timely, easily accessible information, the portals are helping McDATA forge stronger relationships with its partners, customers, and employees. “Our key constituents can now manage their own profiles and contact information; they no longer have to submit changes to headquarters. And they can quickly and easily find the information they need, or drill down and tag the types of announcements they wish to see,” says Hinnen.
Previously, notifications to channel partners were sent via regular mail and e-mail. Sometimes McDATA resellers’ customers received information before the resellers themselves. Today the Documentum system is used by the marketing department as the primary mechanism to reach all tiers of the distribution chain. Via the portal, partners receive information as soon as it is available and never after their customers, which has increased goodwill between McDATA and its partners.
In addition, with the portal McDATA is able to lead partners toward training and development opportunities so that they can become more educated on the company’s products and better equipped to sell and distribute them. “The portal is definitely a win-win for us and them,” says Hinnen.
Reusing Content for Maximum Efficiency and Reach
With the Documentum solution, McDATA is also beginning to reuse content to boost efficiencies. For example, the technical communications group, which creates all of its manuals, online help documents, and marketing materials in Adobe FrameMaker, has started to capture this information in XML chunks to reuse for marketing literature and other purposes,” says Hinnen. “Documentum has the best tool we have found for XML content management.” Eventually McDATA plans to use the Documentum platform to automatically update content across multiple websites.
Supporting Web and Non-Web Initiatives Across the Enterprise
The Documentum solution supports content production across the enterprise, giving McDATA the ability to create, personalize, deliver, and manage content pulled from any part of the extended organization for both Web and non-Web initiatives alike. According to Hinnen, “We started looking at the entire content creation cycle across the enterprise. Documentum was the only vendor that could manage such breadth, and the only vendor that could scale to fit the needs of our enterprise.”
Enabling Cost-Effective Compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley
When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in July 2002 with its far-reaching corporate reform regulations, McDATA turned to Documentum. In only six weeks from concept to production, the company developed a system that leverages the Documentum platform to comply with the new regulations in a timely and cost-effective way.
“When we looked at Sarbanes-Oxley, we asked not what do we have to do to comply with the minimum, but what business benefit is attainable,” said Hinnen. “We realized we would have to direct resources to complying with it but that, for a small incremental amount, we could also drive additional ROI.”
Now all control documentation from different business units are standardized and securely stored and tracked in the Documentum repository. This information is integrated with organizational and financial models, process classification schemes, and risk information data developed by Protiviti, a leading risk consulting and internal audit firm. Documentum capabilities enforce audit trails and records retention rules.
Because internal and external auditors were closely involved in the development of the new system, McDATA believes that it will significantly reduce auditors’ efforts—and, therefore, McDATA’s costs—when the company is reviewed for compliance. The portals also help speed compliance and cut costs by easily demonstrating to auditors how employees and others have access only to the most recent, approved control documents. “We expect this approach will soon become the basis for other types of compliance initiatives, such as FCC compliance and ISO certification,” says Hinnen.
