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Summary
Gardner Smith recognised that their web presence wasn’t of a standard to adequately represent and reflect the quality of their company. They decided to implement a more efficient and effective website and extranet solution and specified that it must be easy to maintain and update the website to ensure it remained up-to-date and relevant to their customers. They wanted a new graphical look and feel that was flexible enough to allow them to maintain distinctive sub-sites. They were also looking for increased efficiency for the website and the extranet, more effective promotion of the Gardner Smith Brands and the ability to provide more targeted information for their international customers. Elcom’s Community Manager.NET was able to provide the content management engine and modular plug ins that allowed Gardner Smith to realise its web presence goals. |
The client
The Gardner Smith Group of companies offers a diverse range of products and services. Each business operates individually or coordinates with its associate companies to provide the Group’s customers with the best service and quality, and its shareholders with the best possible returns. The Group’s activities include storage, packaging, transport and logistics, oilseed processing and refining, trade services in agriproducts procurement and supply, and recycling for used vegetable oils and animal fats. Gardner Smith operates internationally and has a network of offices and facilities throughout Australia, New Zealand, China and South Africa. |
The situation
The Gardner Smith Group’s existing website didn’t reflect the company’s diversity, synergies and commitment to using the latest technologies and innovations to offer comprehensive solutions to its customers. Elcom was able to demonstrate that its flagship product - Community Manager.NET – was able to deliver an easily managed web portal with the ability to spawn distinctive sub sites all of which would have access to the WYSIWYG content management software and workflows. |
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The challenge/business requirements
Ease of use, flexibility, versatility, and the ability to create and easily maintain satellite websites all with distinctive, contemporary looks were some of the criteria Gardner Smith had identified as core requirements. Other requirements included:
- Improved communication with target markets via newsletters and forms
- Tracking usage of the site
- A secure extranet for staff, clients and suppliers
- Online forms (with workflow) for corporate governance
- Devolving the responsibility for updating content, with appropriate
- approval processes
- Dispensing with third party involvement
The solution
Elcom’s Community Manager.NET is a flexible and versatile web content creation and management engine with the potential to act as a web portal when coupled with one of its plug in modules – the multi-site module. The Gardner Smith Portal and satellite sites use the Community Manager.NET platform and the following modules:
- Multi-site
- Form creator
- Workflow
- Security/Membership
- Mailing list/email marketing
- Web statistics
- Question It
- Site filtering
The business benefits
- Efficient management of multiple sites
- Ability to easily create new and distinctive sites whenever needed and to enforce corporate branding standards
- Easy content creation and management through workflows
- Access to the solution anywhere, anytime
- Stable, reliable, secure and versatile technologies
- Highly functional application that can be leveraged in the future through the use of plug-in modules
The technology
- Microsoft Internet Information Server
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Microsoft web development tools
- Elcom's Community Manager.NET
The sites
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