Dec 7, 2007
When Web Sites Go Global

The challenges of maintaining web sites around the world grow as companies expand into new markets and take their messages directly to new audiences.

The web has opened the door for companies to quickly take their message to audiences across the globe, but have businesses really gotten a handle on what it means to actually manage global content?

One company, software publisher Corel Corp., is advancing its strategy for Corel.com in this respect. It’s all about scaling, from both a content and a branding perspective, Corel says. The business delivers web content to more than 25 countries and 20 languages, and in the last few years has purchased a number of other vendors whose content it must quickly integrate with its own infrastructure.

Its goal has been to centralize its content, enable business users to update it in a push-button fashion to keep up with rapidly changing information, remove the redundancies of storing the same content in multiple places, provide the business with the ability to share content across different countries, and quickly and rapidly build new sites based on existing information taxonomies. In recent months, for example, it has launched Taiwan, Polish and Korean web sites.

Companies whose strategy is to manage content with a similar look and feel through a global repository have an uphill battle, says Corel.com team lead Richard Tremblay.

"You’re talking about getting into a bigger scale, managing content in Spanish, French, Japanese, simplified and traditional Chinese. The challenges there are pretty enormous," he says. "It is still difficult in sharing content across those different countries and organizing it in such a way that it makes sense for people managing the content. And how do you link the content of different languages? ... There’s a lot of manual tagging, and a lot of room to grow in the industry in that arena."

But Corel’s content management platform, from vendor FatWire, is doing a pretty good job of helping Corel surmount many of its global content management challenges, says Tremblay. With the latest version, Corel has gained the tools it needed to share content and quickly replicate sites out-of-the-box, shrinking the amount of time to launch a new foreign site in a different language from 12 to four weeks, he says.

Freeing IT from daily content management

"Time to market is everything. By clicking a button you have an information taxonomy and framework to enter content. There’s no dependency on IT," he says. "Now the business understands they truly have an engine to deploy and localize content quite rapidly, so now the art of the possible is there."

In some cases, as when the languages are similar, it might be called the art of the extraordinary: It took just half an hour to replicate the U.S. site and share all its content for its existing Canada site, he says.

One shouldn’t underestimate the advantages of freeing IT from the daily activities of managing content that the software enables.

"Managing content is really an operational activity. It’s a day-to-day activity and the business should be able to do it on their own, without much IT support," says Tremblay.

IT is involved with countless projects around the web site that are strategically important and warrant more of its time, such as personalization, segmentation, and adding elements that can bring value to customers.

"The business wants us to be involved in that, versus managing current content and managing new sites," he says. According to Trembaly, only about 10% of IT staff time is now required on the support aspect of its global web presence.

Additionally, FatWire’s Content Server provides a way to manage messaging tips and tutorials related to Corel’s products that can be accessed from within the software.

"It’s a web service pushed through the product through a window within the product," says Tremblay. "That’s strategic and unique. We can present tips, tutorials, marketing content, all through the user interface within the product, and that’s very significant to Corel’s strategy."

 

Publication: bITa Planet
Jennifer Zaino