Sensus Uses Liferay to Strengthen their Global Web Presence Alaaeldin El-Nattar Principal Architect, Rivet Logic

Danny Ayers Global Online Marketing Communications Manager, Sensus

Sensus Overview

  10,000  Customers  

  42  Loca2ons  on  5  Con2nents  

  Over  3,600  Employees  

  $865  million  sales  

Overview

  Electric    -­‐  Leading  Market  Posi2on  in  North  America  

  Gas    -­‐  Leading  Market  Posi2on  in  North  America  

  Water  -­‐  (and  heat)  Leading  Market  Posi2on  Globally  

  Communica2ons  Network  

  Smart  Meters  

  Advanced  Metrology  

  Distribu2on  Automa2on  

  Demand  Response  

  Home  Area  Network  

  Smart  Grid  Ligh2ng  

  Services  

  SoSware  

Product Portfolio

Utility Customers

Rivet Logic Overview

•  Award-winning professional services focused on enabling: •  Collaboration and Community Platforms •  Enterprise Content Management •  Web Content Management and Portals

•  Using Leading Open Source Software

•  Company Facts •  Headquartered in Reston, VA •  Regional Offices in Boston, New York City, Los Angeles •  Near-shore Development Center in Costa Rica

Rivet Logic and Liferay

•  Certified Partner since 2006 •  Platinum Partner •  Conduct Public Training on East Coast USA •  Contributor (various means) •  Host of first ever East Coast User Conference in 2009 •  25+ Liferay implementations

The Sensus Challenge

•  Disparate messaging around products and solutions

•  Each region has their own CMS

•  US/Canada have a custom built CMS

•  Maintainability issues

•  Flexibility issues

•  Integration with external systems is tough

•  Content localization is not possible

Sensus.com 1.0

•  US/Canada website

•  Inflexible look and feel

•  Inflexible product and solution structure

•  Did the job but couldn’t grow to meet the global needs

Sensus.com 1.0 Global Sites

•  Look and feel inconsistency

•  Lack of control over messaging around products and solutions

•  Inability to manage regional content separately

THE REQUIREMENTS

The Information Architecture

Country Country

Division Division

Product Line

Product Line

Product Product Product

Sensus.com

Relationships & Associations

Division

Product Line

Country

Product

THE SOLUTION

Liferay Communities (Sites)

US/Canada

China

Germany

Dynamic Web Content

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Localization

•  Liferay natively supports localization

•  All portal content will be localizable

•  One tool for all regional authors

•  Same content can be authored in multiple languages

THE CHALLENGES

Liferay Challenges

•  Sensus needed the following:

•  Human readable URLs

•  One page per solution

•  One page per division

•  One page per product line

•  One page per product

•  Product line and product navigation

•  Geolocation

Liferay Challenges

Division

Product Line

Country

Product

Liferay Challenges

•  Liferay’s default URLs are not good enough

•  Liferay allows for creating custom friendly URLs

http://sensus.com/web/usca/solution?id=advanced-metering-infrastructure-ami

http://sensus.com/web/usca/solution/advanced-metering-infrastructure-ami

VS

THE CUSTOMIZATIONS

Divisions Page

Division Summary

Division Tab

Division Page

Division Overview

Product Lines

Product Line

Navigation

Product Line Page

Product Line Overview

Associated Solutions

Products

Product Page

Product Overview

Product Documentation

Associated Solutions

Solutions Page

Solution Summary

Expands Dynamically

Solution Page

Solution Overview

Associated Assets

THE MAGIC

The Basic Concept

•  Completely decouple authoring from presentation

•  A simple authoring process:

•  Authors create content using Web forms

•  Authors categorize content

•  Content is auto-published to the right spot

•  Look and feel is automatically taken care of

How it works (Authoring)

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Web Form Authoring

How it works (Tagging)

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P U B L I S H

AMI Systems

P U B L I S H

US

AMI Systems

Water

Country

Product Line

Division

THE DEMO

Comparison •  Before •  Non scalable, proprietary CMS that did

not allow control of design, layout, and most content.

•  Did not have flexibility to adapt to continued growth.

•  Did not support regionalization, internationalization, and 3rd party integration (Sharepoint, etc..)

•  Poor readiness for Marketing (SEO, SEM, micro sites, Salesforce integration)

•  Overall a reduced ability to extend our current web offering

•  After •  Enterprise level solution + community

and enterprise support •  Dynamic CMS that meets the needs of

current business and provides flexibility to adapt to future.

•  Have infrastructure to support regionalized product offerings and internationalized languages

•  Support for 3rd party integration, document management, SSO

•  Marketing / content creation ready: SEO, quickly deploy micro sites/landing pages, WYSIWYG editing, drag and drop layouts

•  Already looking at ways to expand into other parts of our business (training, document management) due to the flexibility that Liferay offers

THE FUTURE

What the Future Holds

•  Sharepoint integration

•  Adding global sites to sensus.com

•  French

•  German

•  Content translations on International Site

•  English

•  French

•  Spanish

Standards & Openness

•  Liferay is: •  Standards compliant •  Easy to maintain •  Open source •  Highly customizable •  Has a healthy community

Q&A

Thank You!

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