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Our talks at Drupal Business Days

We have two interesting sessions at Drupal Business Days in Helsinki on May 26-27. Saila Laitinen will talk about What does a fruitful partnership consist of? and Janne Kalliola will have a session about Growing and Managing Drupal Organisations. Both sessions are on Thursday, May 26. The full programme is also available.

We are also a silver sponsor of the event and have made the site on top of COD base system installed by Mearra.

Saila and Janne will be at the event on both days. Please come to say hello to them, if you are around.

DrupalCamp Stockholm presentation now available

Janne Kalliola visited DrupalCamp Stockholm last Friday to discuss on Other CMS Compared to Drupal.

The slides of the presentation are now available on Slideshare and also embedded below.

Breakfast seminar on designing and implementing business-driven web sites on Thursday April 14

Exove hosts a free breakfast seminar on designing and implementing business-driven web sites on Thursday April 14 in Ruoholahti at HTC Pinta on Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki.

Enroll (in Finnish) – Seminaariesittely suomeksi – Ilmoittaudu

A company’s web site is a highly visible showcase allowing increased interaction with old and new customers alike. A well executed site enables and supports substantial business activities.

A web site needs to be coupled with the business of a company from the concept design phase. Without proper integration with the core values and operations of a company — a web site can soon become an isolated entity without real positive impact on your business.

Creating a web site that excels and reaches a company’s target audience requires a dedicated effort, proper planning and faultless execution.

Exove’s free breakfast seminar discusses designing and implementing business-driven websites with a hands-on approach using eZ Publish as the platform. Exove’s customers will present cases where eZ Publish has been used to help create business-driven websites.

Come to listen and discuss about business-driven website design and implementation.

The seminar will be held in Finnish, the material will be in English.

Programme

Enroll (in Finnish) – Ohjelma suomeksi – Ilmoittaudu

Bertrand Maugain, Juha Jauhiainen, and Jani Tarvainen are available for 20 minute, one on one meetings after the seminar. If you are interested, please send an email to info@exove.com.

Enroll (in Finnish) – Ilmoittaudu

Case: Lily.fi

Lily is an online magazine based on a new social media concept comprised of blogging, sharing and edited, journalistic content. Lily as it can be viewed and read online is created by its users in collaboration with media professionals. Every user can set up a column of their own and share their ideas and views with the community. Lily can also be consumed as a magazine without participating in the content provision. Lily is published by A-lehdet, one of the largest magazine publishers in Finland.

Exove played a central role in implementing Lily.fi. The concept of a community-driven and user-friendly service was designed by A-lehdet digital media. Exove implemented the new service concept onto a technology platform consisting of Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL in close collaboration with A-lehdet digital media specialists. The HTML/CSS templates of the site were built based on layout images provided by A-lehdet and integrated to Drupal by Exove.

The service was built on Drupal, an open source CMS platform. Exove extended Drupal mainly with existing third-party modules, among those ApacheSolr, ApacheSolrAjax, CCK, Views, Drupal for Facebook, Flag, WYSIWYG Imageupload, Imagecache, Nodequeue and Radioactivity. Additionally, some modules were implemented by A-lehdet and Exove to accommodate the need for some highly customized functionality.

Lily.fi was designed to tolerate high loads from the beginning. The site was built considering requirements set by Varnish HTTP accelerator, mainly the cacheability of page loads. In order to achieve this in a generic and scalable way, a new way to control Drupal’s output mechanisms was designed and implemented without interfering with the Drupal core.

Further, a user-friendly and highly customizable interface for bloggers was implemented in the project. The implementation greatly differs from Drupal’s normal content management flow but still relies heavily on ready-made components and was implemented following good Drupal practices.

Sini Liila, Project Manager at A-lehdet digital media, describes the result of the project as follows: “We have worked with Exove before and were confident in diving into this project, knowing the technical end-product would be as specified and as expected. Like before, the collaboration ran smoothly and it was a pleasure to work with the Exove team. For Lily, as a new concept and way of doing things, it was important that any mishaps in either concept design or technical implementation could be corrected ‘on the go’. The few incidents where this kind of agile approach became necessary, Exove was able to follow through and be flexible in finding a remedy quickly.”

The technical implementation for Lily.fi was supervised by Web Developer Tobias Rask of A-lehdet digital media. Tobias highlights the Exove role in the project as follows: “ Working with Exove was easy and convenient. They implemented our definitions with professional skill into flexible Drupal site, which is easy to maintain.”
Please check www.lily.fi, for the actual implementation of the service.

Case: Tecnotree.com

We have, together with Frantic and Exove Design, renewed Tecnotree’s web site.

Tecnotree is a global provider of a wide range of telecom IT solutions focused on charging, billing, customer care, messaging and content services. Tecnotree empowers communication service providers to create and monetize a broad marketplace of digital services, and augment value across the customer lifecycle.

Exove and Exove Design designed and implemented the renewal of www.tecnotree.com for Tecnotree in collaboration with Tecnotree and Frantic.

Exove Design created the concept of the site based on the strategy, product portfolio, and marketing needs of Tecnotree. The work was done in close collaboration with Tecnotree personnel. Based on the concept, Frantic provided the visual design.

Exove then implemented the site adapting the concept and the visuals into the site structure, Tecnotree’s distinct look’n’feel, and content blocks. The content management system used is eZ Publish, a commercial open source CMS by eZ Systems. eZ Publish was selected based on the ease of use and management, support for various content types, and flexibility with the site structure and layout.

Timo Laaksonen, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Tecnotree, describes the result of the project as follows: “We knew we had a mountain to climb: Ultra-fast planning and implementation schedule of ~8 weeks, complete renewal of the site (concept, visuals, content, platform), no visual material and only high level design guidelines available, lack of own staff to participate in the project – to name just a few. This meant that the concept and overall implementation was iterated in real time, on the fly. Thanks to the professionality, service attitude and sheer perseverance the team – Exove, Frantic and Tecnotree – the project achieved all of its goals. Maybe the best web project I have ever been a part of.”

Partnered with eZ Systems

We have made a partnership deal with eZ Systems, the provider of commercial open source CMS eZ Publish, and will from now on provide the commercial version of eZ Publish to our customers in Finland, Estonia, and other Baltic countries.

We see eZ Publish the best choice for sites with large amount of diversified content, multiple languages, distributed content management organisations, or a lot of structured data. For example, if you have a multinational corporate site, a product catalogue, or magazine site, eZ Publish could be a perfect fit for you. It also provides excellent connectivity to mobile applications and sites, thus making it a natural selection for sites spanning from web to mobile phones.

Working as a platinum partner of eZ Systems, we are now able to channel their expertise on the system and Internet publishing to further benefit our customers. Together with them, we will continue to design and implement beautiful and functional sites that enable our customers to conduct better business on the Internet.

Exove has produced the largest and the most compelling eZ Publish powered websites in Finland. They include several companies, for example:

• Several dozen sites for Fiskars, including sites in most European countries, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
• Tecnotree site.
• Finnlines main site with several localised versions around the Baltic Sea.
• Tietokone.fi magazine site.
• Sites for The Federation of Finnish Commerce and The Association of Finnish Technical Traders.
• Finndomokoti.fi, a radically different way to present prefabricated houses on the Internet.
• Several sites for TAT Group.

eZ Systems is in the business of Web Content Management Solutions since 1999. They maintain a global presence in locations in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Their large international business partner network is the foundation of their success in the market. Ez Systems’ team of engineers, consultants and partner managers enables successful implementations for customers and partners.

Office in Estonia

We have opened our first international office in Tallinn, Estonia. The first Estonian colleagues joined the company late last week, and now we are already working in full steam across the Gulf of Finland.

We bring our excellent Drupal, WordPress, eZ Publish, and CodeIgniter experience to Estonian market, and we will serve clients in Estonia with the same high level of quality and performance as in Finland. If you are interested in our solutions, please contact our CEO Janne Kalliola, either by mail — janne@exove.ee — or by phone — +358 40 558 1796.

If you are interested in joining our Tallinn team, please visit our Estonian recruiting pages.

Our office is located in Metro Plaza building on Viru Väljak 2, in the middle of the city. More details can be found on contacts page.

Customer survey results 2010

We have once again held our annual customer satisfaction survey, and got feedback from our clients. This post summarises the key findings. Once again, thank you for all of you who responded.

Our general ratings improved compared to last year, and a huge majority (~80%) of respondents are satisfied or very satisfied with our services and us. Our price / quality ratio is also seen good or excellent by more than 65% of respondents, and less than 5% think that it is poor. Rest think that we are on par with everyone else. Our ability to keep the budget in every project throughout our history shows in the answers.

Our services were rated mostly excellent (~30%) or good (~50%), but also average (~15%) or poor (less than 5%). We have approximately kept the scores compared to last year. Responsiveness, keeping promises, and understanding clients’ needs were regarded very high, around 80-90% good or excellent. There were no major changes from the last year. As earlier, clients like our staff, and we are seen both friendly and professional.

More than 75% of you think that we are better than our competition, another 20% don’t see differences, and only less than 5% think that we are doing worse. More than 95% of you would buy again from us (of those about 25% definitely). These numbers have improved somewhat from the last year, continuing our tradition of high customer satisfaction in this regard.

On the other front, whopping 50% of clients have already recommended us, 30% would definitely recommend, another 15% would recommend, and the remaining 5% are not willing to recommend us. All in all more than 95% of our clients would recommend us, which is an extremely delightful result and shows that we are doing well serving you.

Clients value our professionalism, reliability, and agility. We are also regarded as responsive, passionate, committed to joint success, efficient, innovative, and friendly.

If you feel that we could be a good — agile, friendly, and professional — partner for you, get in touch with Janne Kalliola, +358 40 558 1796 or janne@exove.com.

Eazybreak in news

Eazybreak is a mobile voucher company that is challenging the status quo in lunch, sports, and culture vouchers market first in Finland, and later in other countries. Their look’n'feel, sites and systems are designed and implemented by Exove.

Their innovative concept has been picked up by Helsingin Sanomat, Kauppalehti, and Taloussanomat. All articles are in Finnish.

Fiskars Garden sites

Fiskars is a leading global supplier of consumer products for the home, garden and outdoors. Fiskars products are renowned for their functionality and cutting-edge design, and the Group has a strong portfolio of trusted international brands including Fiskars, Iittala, Gerber, Silva, and Buster.

Exove has played a central role in designing and implementing the new Fiskars global consumer sites onto an Open Source platform. The service was built on eZ Publish, an open source CMS platform that offers versatile content management capabilities, good usability for content editors, and flexible development tools for developers. The developed system spans 30 countries and geographical areas across the globe.
The goal was to create an integrated environment to contain all Fiskars consumer product categories ranging from crafting to gardening. In the past different product lines had dedicated websites causing cost overhead and content fragmentation.

The concept, layouts and Flash elements were created by the Fiskars’ internal marketing team. Exove handled the technical execution from template design to system customization to deployment. eZ Publish was integrated to external systems such as the ZipBurst store locator and SureSource eCommerce system. Automatic prefilling of customer service forms with product data and customer image uploads enhance the web as a channel for customer service.

As the project schedule was tight, site development and content entry was done in parallel. To further accelerate the content entry process Exove also migrated about 750 product items from the legacy IBM WebSphere platform automatically, freeing up Fiskars’ resources for other tasks.

The project had a few focal areas to ensure best of breed user experience, content promotion, and product findability: system flexibility, rich media support, search, and search engine optimisation.

Flexibility
By default Content Management Systems often limit the end users to do a limited set of tasks. In Fiskars’ case the company had a technically capable in-house team that wished they could create custom content into the system. Exove implemented the system in a way that allows the customer to embed custom content such as campaign pages independently without the need for Exove’s intervention.

In addition to custom pages the system allows content elements in the right column to be managed through the eZ Publish interface. This allows Fiskars’ to independently create unique sets of content for a certain section. For example, the right column can hold promotional banners, external JavaScript widgets and rich text content.

During the specification phase some features – such as web store and store finder – were identified to be available only on some sites. Exove implemented them as site features that can be disabled or enabled. This keeps template development structured and allows Fiskars to roll out features to selected country sites only.

Rich media support and content delivery
In addition to text and image content the platform also supports the publishing of video online. Fiskars had an archive of existing video content ranging from individual product promotion videos to series of videos – such as Fiskars TV. Video objects are placed in the media library and linked to dedicated video pages. Links to video objects in rich text content areas open the videos in a modal window.

Section landing pages on the site hold a Flash element that can also be managed using the default eZ Publish administration elements. The main Flash element is integrated to eZ Publish using a custom XML format specified by the Fiskars’ internal team. The banner can hold images or embedded Flash animations.

To ensure content distribution with minimal overhead Exove installed and configured the Varnish reverse proxy to serve all static content such as video, images, stylesheets and JavaScript.

Search
Designing an information architecture for hundreds of products is a challenge. In addition to navigating to the individual products using the navigation it is essential to provide the visitors with a robust search function. eZ Publish has an integrated search extension (eZ Find) based on the popular Open Source search engine Solr.

By using eZ Find Exove was able to provide Fiskars with site wide search functionality with minimal effort. Using Solr the search functionality yields relevant results in milliseconds. Additionally, eZ Find enables content editors to elevate selected content elements when a certain keyword is used in the search – thus allowing internal advertisements and content promotions.

The search index spans all content stored in eZ Publish, including metadata such as content author and keywords.

Search engine optimisation
To ensure optimal search engine visibility the templates were designed to allow crawlers unrestricted access to all content. Using the progressive enhancement ideology every content item is available even to clients without advanced features such as JavaScript or Adobe Flash. In addition to technical features, project focused on writing proper page titles, descriptions, metadata, and payed extra attention to cross linking and other factors contributing to improving search engine rank.

Automated sitemap generation guarantees that search engines index the available content as soon as possible. The sitemaps protocol is supported by most of the popular search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. Duplicate indexing is of content prevented by using the canonical meta-tag.

Please visit the country sites for garden tools found at www.fiskars.com, under country selector.