Editus.lu

Background.

Editus, the official publisher of Luxembourg's Yellow Pages and White Pages telephone directory, transformed their business from paper to digital quite some time ago. Offering customized online services, such as one-page, brochure, or custom-tailored websites and digital commerce stores together with SEO and marketing services, has been successful across the country over the last number of years. To take care of thousands of customers efficiently and provide excellent services, further transformation was needed.

Challenges.

As producing and maintaining thousands of websites was done manually, without any connection to the core administration system at Editus, the lead time from the customer placing an order to having the website online took five months on average, accompanied by substantial production costs. 

With different technologies in use and an external provider responsible for creating the websites, shortening the lead time and optimizing costs for the growing customer base were hard tasks to achieve. 

Options and opportunities as to how customers can promote their products and services on the websites were limited due to the manual process. Also, the performance and security of websites were demanding issues, namely for large business customers.   

Solution.

The leadership team at Editus knew that consolidating scattered technologies and taking control over the production process was needed to be able to deliver outstanding customer experiences with reasonable costs.  

After searching for a solution that can be easily adapted by multiple teams with different demands involved in the process, Editus chose Kentico Xperience as the platform that would streamline the production process and allow the company to provide high-quality, future-proof services.

In less than three months, a robust and secure solution was created and integrated with the Editus core administration system. Running in the private datacenter with active design, the solution was built with high availability and using technologies such as IIS, DFSR, or proxy servers.

The deployment process was divided into staging, UAT, and production environments and completely automated. Although Editus is using different providers for DNS or SSL certificates allowing customers to use their own IPs and domain names, creating and publishing a website is now a single-click process that doesn’t require any human intervention. 

Editus leveraged the MVC development approach to produce templates and widgets enabling easy customization and personalization of websites. Customers have literally thousands of combinations available to customize their own websites, all within a user interface that is much easier to use. 

The solution underwent several penetration tests and durability assessments with excellent results.  The biggest customers with large commerce sites even performed their own vulnerability assessments and penetration tests, all without finding any issue. 

Results.

• Three months to build the highly available solution, secured by design
• Two and a half times faster overall lead time in delivering personalized customers’ websites
• One click is needed to create and deploy a customer website
• Thousands of combinations for customizing and personalization available for customers

During the first month with the new Kentico Xperience solution in place, more than one thousand of customers’ websites were created by leveraging a completely automated process that is integrated with the core administration system. Nowadays, the company has more than 1,300 individual websites hosted on their servers. The manual work of deploying websites was completely eliminated. 

Also, time needed to populate a website with content and imagery was dramatically decreased. When a customer orders a website, Editus is able to provide a fully-fledged website in less than two months on average, covering not only the delivery of the website but also content authoring, training, and documentation. 

And it is not limited to template-based websites with similar layouts and changing logos, images, and copy. Visuals are tailored by project managers and content is produced by internal copywriters based on meetings with customers where specifications are defined.

The product management team at Editus can easily design new services or enhance existing ones while keeping a short time-to-market. They are able to provide customers with new widgets tailored to specific needs and use cases, e.g., menu publishing and updating for restaurants, and roll them out to the market very efficiently. 

As the whole business process is now internalized, Editus fully understands production costs and is able to optimize them efficiently. Because of the scalable and secure solution with automated processes, Editus can afford completely different sized teams than before, delivering much better customer experiences