SharePoint-based Content Conversion & Distribution
Challenge
Businesses continuously generate content including technical notes, publications, agreements, contracts, manuals, legal documents, multimedia, business cases, news articles, and many more. Consumers of this content require content in various formats. However, converting content based on consumer requirements is expensive and prone to errors. Moreover, distributing this content to consumers via email, fax, paper, etc. as well as on predefined schedule is labor-intensive.
Our client, a #1 ranked state University, is a second-largest creator and distributor of business cases, technical notes, presentations, books, articles, etc. Several channels such as business schools like Harvard, Stanford, etc. and publishing houses like McGraw Hill, Wiley and Sons, and other distribution hubs like Ivey Publishing, European Clearing House, etc. need this content in several content formats. The content also has to be distributed based on each channel’s preference for time, location, method, etc.
Lack of a system to manage conversion and distribution resulted in:
- Limits on the number of channels University could serve with existing staff
- Labor-intensive process made the process expensive and prone to manual errors
- Decline in revenue
Our Solution
Our professionals analyzed the business and technical challenges and proposed a custom SharePoint 2013 based solution.
The solution allowed administrators to define rules through the web interface. Accordingly, the solution converted the content in most of the popular content formats. Moreover, the content could be branded and personalized for each channel. For example, the content could be white-labeled for a channel where all the University’s branding was stripped automatically. The solution also distributed content to an online eCommerce store.
Few key solution features are:
- 100% web-based solution with high configurability
- User-defined rule based execution to offer complete control
- Process time was reduced from 1 week to 10 minutes!
Enhanced productivity
Improved control over the process
Increased predictability
Lower cost of ownership gaps
Rules based execution to enhance configurability
Full featured 100% web-based interface with easy administration
100% configurable
Support for most of the industry-standard content formats such as ePub, PDF, MOBI, XML, etc.
Content filter rules based on content metadata
XML conversion supports cleansing and transformation
Content grouping and relationships were preserved
Distribution supports flexible scheduling including day, day-of-week, day-of-month, etc.
Distribution delivery includes email, FTP server, HTTP Post, Web Services, etc.
Supports full or incremental distribution.
Managing 10,000+ content
Highly available and scalable solution
Sharepoint 2013
SQL Server 2013
Windows 2012 R2 Servers
SQL Server Reporting Services [SSRS]
Custom Event Receivers
- IT Strategy
- workMETHODS strategized the solution and technologies.
- IT Turnkey Solution Development
- workMETHODS developed a custom solution based on above technologies.
- IT Managed Services
- workMETHODS hosts the solution on its servers. We manage and monitor the servers. We provide email and phone-based application support.