Wine Australia

Wine Australia invests in research and development, building markets, sharing information and knowledge, encouraging adoption, and protecting the reputation of Australian wine.

The organization had been using Sitecore for some time and the platform had enabled them to develop an updatable online presence. However, satisfaction amongst content managers and editors was extremely low due to how challenging and time-consuming the system was to use. It wasn’t delivering on the organization’s strategic goals nor could it fully support them in the rolling out of their new branding.

“Our Sitecore implementation was underperforming and not aligned with where Wine Australia needed to be,” says Brooke Beales, Marketing Global Operations Manager at Wine Australia.

As a trusted industry authority, it was important that the company create and share up-to-date and reliable content with its various industry stakeholders. The volume of content the team needed to manage, consolidate, and publish was growing, as was the complexity of the content workflows they relied on. Not only did they need to be able to publish some content in restricted partner- and stakeholder-only areas, but they needed greater accessibility and cultural sensitivity when publishing certain information.

 Besides which, the time required to deliver on the feature-burdened system meant the value provided by the costly Sitecore license was falling woefully short of expectations.

You can’t put new wine in an old bottle

When it became obvious that Sitecore could no longer deliver on the organization’s growing requirements, Wine Australia turned to Devotion, an independently owned, full-service digital agency based in New South Wales.

As one of the top Kentico Gold Partners in Australia, Devotion’s team of specialists have been implementing award-winning Kentico websites for the past 12 years and have built over 160 Kentico websites—many of which have won Site of the Month and Site of the Year awards.

Decanting from Sitecore to Kentico

Early in the process, it was clear that Kentico was the ideal solution for Wine Australia. Not only did it provide better value for money based on the organization’s specific short- and long-term business needs, but Kentico's product roadmap outlined enhancements that were aligned to where Wine Australia wanted to go. The platform was chosen for its powerful and efficient content management capabilities optimized for ease of use, as well as its ability to automate much of Wine Australia's digital marketing.

So, the process of migrating the business' existing content from Sitecore across to Kentico began. “The ability to easily migrate content meant switching platforms was far less daunting than initially thought,” says Brooke Beales.

Seamlessly supercharging content publishing

A combination of out-of-the-box content management features and functionality as well as custom modules were implemented to allow for scale and flexibility and a team of 30 content editors was engaged to write, review, and edit large volumes of content that would accompany the launch of the new brand. This was all then seamlessly imported into Kentico, saving months of content-focused administration work.  

The initial project took around ten months, which ensured adequate time to manage internal stakeholders, perform proper UX design and testing, and optimize the quality of the content to be published.

Keeps getting better with age

Wine Australia always had its sights on both the short and long term. They wanted a solution that would not only bring immediate efficiency benefits, but would be able to grow with the organization. Thanks to Kentico's scalability and extensibility, the platform is able to mold itself around Wine Australia's specific current requirements and to adapt to its changing needs as it flourishes and evolves.

 Since its launch, Wine Australia has been upgraded to a newer version of Kentico with MVC architecture and has benefited from ongoing feature enhancements and optimizations on a monthly basis.