Cogen

Company: Eprise (Subsequently acquired by Divine)Customer: CogenSubmitted by: MCC InternationalDate: June 2001Companies today need to communicate quickly and effectively with their global marketplace. As product lifecycles and manufacturing timelines shorten, more new products need to be launched in the face of stiff competition.

Hence smooth communication and workflow management by all those involved in the process of creating and disseminating information about a product or a company is vital.

Background

This is exactly the challenge faced by Cogen’s customers. As manufacturing and/or service companies operating in a global marketplace, they must generate huge amounts of rapidly changing information in a large number of foreign languages.Cogen is a specialist translation company, with a heritage in paper-based translation campaigns for its customers. Cogen helps its customers by designing, operating and maintaining customised language solutions. For each customer, Cogen assembles, motivates and coordinates teams of contributors (from content generators to content translators and validators).

Then they design, implement, audit and improve processes and workflows for creating and disseminating content. Finally, Cogen installs and maintains the collaborative browser-based platforms where all the participants in a language solution post and retrieve their contributions.

The Challenge

In 2000, the corporate focus was beginning to move towards online projects and as such, Cogen decided to relaunch its Web site to reflect this, as Dirk Rijmenants, Strategic Consultant, Cogen explains:”It became apparent in 2000 that more and more customers wanted a company that could provide both paper-based translation services and Web translations as well. We had a Web site already, but in its current form, its functionality would not meet with our current requirements, so we decided to implement a full Web site re-launch instead.”

The Eprise Solution

Cogen chose Participant Server® from Eprise as the development tool for the language solution’s collaborative platform.

Participant Server was discovered through a customer – an engine manufacturer – who had selected it after a careful review of several content management systems.Eprise provides strategic content management solutions that enable users to create and publish effective Web content quickly and easily. Its flexible product, Participant Server provides the foundation for content management and continues its innovative support for ease-of-use and robust user functionality, creating solutions that improve e-business effectiveness.A key benefit of Eprise Participant Server is its ease-of-use. Eprise enables rapid deployment of Web content by users of all skill levels and that, thanks to automated site management, users can concentrate on the content and do not need to bother about the programming aspects of creating a website.

The Right Choice

After this first positive experience, Cogen used Participant Server to create and deploy its own corporate website.Here too, Participant Server proved to be the right choice. Rijmenants comments, “The training organised by Eprise was comprehensive, and gave us what we needed to get up and running immediately. We developed templates based on our advertising agency’s graphic concept and all participants in the project started using them to create and submit their web pages to validators, who simply had to retrieve the pages from the platform and post them again for final publication. It all went so smoothly that we were able to meet a very tight schedule.”In the early stages, Cogen was concerned that the tight schedule would be an issue, but as Rijmenants explains, Eprise was able to put their minds at rest:”Eprise allows you to meet your deadlines without needing constant technical support.

You only need a basic knowledge of the Internet and how to use a Web browser interface to work successfully with Participant Server. In fact, it’s straightforward to use, so the first day you use the system, you can expect to get a page live on the site, without continuous supervision.”Eprise was up to the challenge of the tight deadline and Cogen’s new Web site went live as planned on 1st January 2001 and Rijmenants is also confident about the future maintenance of Cogen’s Web site:”It will be fairly straightforward since updated content will be submitted, retrieved and published following the same workflows. And, since Participant Server allowed us to create templates, changes introduced once will be reflected across the entire website with just one click.”

Conclusion

Eprise Participant Server has enabled Cogen to develop a Web site that remains consistent in the quality of the data it provides.

Modifications need only be made once, and all the other pages on the site update automatically to accommodate new information. Cogen is also impressed with the ease of controlling the content for its individual customers, targeting its data to each client’s specific needs.”Each customer we work with has very different requirements,” adds Rijmenants. “The Eprise solution enables us to publish a site that is totally in keeping with what they want, which is incredibly beneficial.”Cogen is happy with Participant Server, and plans to use the software for future developments as Dirk Rijmenants concludes:”Standard Web technology allows for fast and efficient prototyping. If you add to it the functionality of Participant Server, you can roll out new releases of an application, implement new features and selectively offer them to a controlled audience with minimal effort.

There is no doubt that Participant Server will continue to be the backbone of the P2P cooperation with our partners.”