Multi-lingual News Forums Selection and Delivery

Business Challenge

A major news organisation with a large foreign language presence required a new system to replace their interactive forums system. The new system was required to be flexible, configurable and scaleable to meet the organisation's ever increasing requirements. The new system also had to assist Editorial in handling the large and ever increasing number of posts received daily. In particular, the selected system had to be able to cope with the very high volumes of user contributions when an important news story was breaking.

Editorially, the new IT System had to have the configurability and flexibility to enable the right balance between readability (simple layout) and user empowerment (rating, reputation, identity, etc). It was also required to reduce editorial and moderation effort and costs.

A further key requirement was the handling of foreign languages including Arabic, Russian, Chinese (Simple & Traditional), Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Spanish, etc. In addition, the content had to be available for inclusion on platforms other than the web (PDA, mobiles, interactive television, etc).

Solution

We provided supplier selection, consultancy and project management expertise in particular, we:

• Project managed the process from RFI through to project launch
• Wrote the RFI document and assessed the options
• Identified best candidate for further investigation
• Defined and managed project budget
• Wrote detailed Technical & Business Assessment document prior to making final selection
• Wrote Business Requirements document
• Defined changes and enhancements to the selected system
• Managed the Graphical Design process for the new skin
• Managed the software development and configuration changes
• Managed integration with the organisation's Single Sign On system
• Defined and managed Security requirements
• Wrote Test Strategy, Test Plan and managed the Testing Phase of the Project
• Managed the rollout strategy
• Provided client support during the rollout phase
• Managed the language translation process and rollout of main Language forums
• Set up Operational and Support agreements

Business Benefits

There were a number of business benefits delivered as a result of this project including:

• Simple, Intuitive & Secure
• Significantly Reduced Moderation Costs
• Increased editorial flexibility
• Provided the ability to editorially handle a huge increase in visitor contributions
• Ability to handle multiple languages
• Painless rollout both technically and editorially
• Greatly reduced operational support costs
• Greatly reduced maintenance costs
• Provided the required a stable, robust, flexible and scalable platform to meet future requirements

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