Phoenix Technologies helped launch the PC industry 22 years ago with its PhoenixBIOS software. Today, Phoenix products are at the heart of more than 1 billion PCs, servers, embedded systems, and other intelligent digital devices. The company has more than 500 employees and offices in Europe, Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan, in addition to its San Jose, California, headquarters.
With 25 patents and customers that include PC manufacturers, motherboard companies, system builders, and digital device manufacturers, Phoenix has been a technology leader in almost every aspect of its business—except for the company’s Web site.
"It was actually embarrassing," says Cliff Bell, who became Phoenix's Chief Information Officer in early 2002. Because of acquisitions, Phoenix had Web sites in four different languages and in three different designs, Bell explains, and much of the content on those sites was seriously outdated. "Recently, I was looking at one of the pages for our Taiwan office, and I saw the date 2000 on the page,” Bell says. “I asked what that meant, and I was told that was the last date the content had been changed.” He then found out that the site was written in the form of Chinese used on the mainland. "All our customers are on Taiwan using a traditional style of Chinese, and so our Web site wasn't even published in the right idiom,” he says.
Using page creation tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver, Bell's four-person Web staff handled all the content and updates to the content. But the information technology (IT) department had neither the bandwidth nor the headcount to make content updates—let alone design changes—in a timely manner. Because all content changes had to go through the IT department, changes in content sometimes required days or even weeks to execute. "We were a bottleneck," Bell admits.
In addition, the customer experience was not at the levels Phoenix wanted to provide, for example only limited technical documentation was available on the Web site for customers, and much of it was no longer current.
And because of company growth by acquisitions, some of Phoenix's Web sites were maintained by external hosting companies making access and consistency even more difficult, adds Rhonda Walters, the company's Senior Web Development Manager.
Walters and Bell knew that it was time for a change.
After evaluating several different ways to modernize its Web site production processes, Phoenix Technologies chose a combination of Microsoft® Content Management Server (CMS) and SharePoint™ Portal Server. In only three months, the company converted its entire Web site production process to use CMS and completely revamped its external Web site.
The company's Web materials are available in five languages, including both forms of Chinese, with all languages using the same graphics and artwork. Today, the marketing department has complete control of the look and feel of the Phoenix Web site, and the marketing staffers can add material to the site whenever they want to.
In addition, Phoenix used the integration between SharePoint Portal Server and Content Management Server for additional organizational efficiency by further empowering their employees. Documents placed in SharePoint repository are available to CMS and can be posted to the Phoenix intranet site with just a few keystrokes. "SharePoint is like a library where people go and check documents in and out. CMS is like your newspaper, where you share information to an audience. They work in concert because people need a repository for their documents, and the authors need the publishing workflow that's in CMS," Walters explains.
Four departments are online after the first phase, and nearly twenty departments will be using SharePoint within the next few months. “While each department has a key coordinator, in SharePoint almost everyone's a potential author with content to contribute that others in the company can benefit from," Walters says.
The Phoenix engineering department is now evaluating the company's technical documentation. Some will be marked “public” and made available on the public Web site; other documentation will be marked “NDA” (nondisclosure agreement) and made available only to partners; and some will stay inside the company. Content Management Server makes this distinguishing process simple and reliable.
The transition was easy because CMS takes advantage of Phoenix's existing Microsoft Windows® 2000 Active Directory® directory service security settings, allowing all the roles, groups, and permissions needed in CMS and SharePoint to be inherited directly from Active Directory.
Efficient Web Publishing Keeps Content Up to Date
The switch to Content Management Server means that people in marketing and other departments can update their own content without waiting for the IT department. Now, with familiar tools from Microsoft Office, everyone has the ability to create or update Web content. Changes are published daily, compared with long delays under the old system. The CMS publishing templates make it easy to keep a consistent navigation structure and a common look and feel, even though the new Phoenix Technologies Web site is published in multiple languages. "Anyone—from marketing, legal, or even engineering—can send a change through an approval process,” says Walters.
The new Phoenix Web content producers can manage the publishing process, previewing content and arranging in advance for future publishing. "They can time-stamp content, preview it, get it approved, and submit it on a Friday afternoon and go home for the weekend knowing it'll be up there Monday morning, just as planned," Walters says. “Our users really like that.”
The intranet based on SharePoint is also popular with Phoenix staff. The legal department was the first to complete the conversion and the first department to benefit from the dramatic increase in information retrieval speed, Bell says.
Before SharePoint, the company's legal documents were stored in an image format, which could not be searched, and could identify each document only with a complicated numbering scheme. "They used to call up a document and then go get coffee or even lunch, only to find out that the document they called up wasn't the one they wanted,” says Walters.
Now the company's legal documents have been converted to a searchable Portable Document Format (PDF). The Phoenix legal staff can search the files for specific text and call up a 30-page contract in less than a minute and sometimes less than 10 seconds, compared with the 5 to 20 minutes it took before SharePoint. "Our legal people just love SharePoint,” says Walters.
Now that Web site production is no longer the IT department's main focus, Bell's staff is working on much more value-added assignments. "We creating Web tools; we're building license generators for our products and lead generation pages; we're building extranets for our partners," says Bell. "We have an IT staff that's somewhat overworked, but they were always overworked. And now, at least, they're excited about where their careers are going."
Bell says what he most appreciates about the switch to Content Management Server and SharePoint was the credibility that his department gained within the company. "It's not just a success story in what it did for the business,” he says, “but a success story in building partnerships within the business."
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For more information about Microsoft Content Management Server, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/cmserver/
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http://www.phoenix.com/
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