Engenda at PBS

Red Bridge's Engenda content management solution provides the Public Broadcasting Service the ability to manage its growing and highly successful website PBS.org

Customer

PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, is a private, non-profit media enterprise owned and operated by the nation's 349 public television stations. A trusted community resource, PBS uses the power of noncommercial television, the Internet and other media to enrich the lives of all Americans through quality programs and education services that inform, inspire and delight. Available to 99% of American homes with televisions, PBS serves nearly 100 million people weekly.

Challenge

With over 100,000 pages of content and more than 7 million pageviews a day day, PBS needed a content management system that would more efficiently manage the creation and maintenance of content for their PBS.org site. New content is constantly being added to the PBS.org site and existing content is updated daily. Managing the process of adding new content and updating existing content was becoming too hard a task without a system in place to formalize and automate these tasks. The time required for basic maintenance and administration of content on PBS.org did not allow PBS time to pursue strategic initiatives for improving the quality of the PBS.org site and enhancing features and services provided to visitors of PBS.org.

Solution

PBS engaged Red Bridge partner TechSpan to analyze the requirements and implement a content management system (CMS). Initially, TechSpan worked with the various groups within PBS, to analyze and document the requirements for the new system. PBS then prioritized the requirements gathered by TechSpan and together they established a baseline for the implementation of the system. Lastly, TechSpan implemented Engenda using the established baseline as a project roadmap. The project lasted approximately seven months with TechSpan customizing Engenda and integrating it with the ATG Dynamo personalization engine, to meet PBS' needs.

The primary goal of the project was to establish a solid foundation for the CMS. This was accomplished through developing services and utilities that provided the following:

• Analyzed the various types of content PBS provides and creating a taxonomy inside Engenda that represents PBS' various forms of content,
• Modeled the processes PBS uses to create and maintain content for PBS.org,
• Set up workflows based on these models within Engenda to automate these tasks.

Once a solid base was established for Engenda, TechSpan consultants worked with PBS to provide a set of utilities and services to ease administration of the system and allow PBS to enhance the PBS.org viewing experience.

For example, PBS.org provides newsletters in three different formats to the public, with the changes for each format being done by hand. Using Engenda, TechSpan automated the creation of different formatted versions of the newsletter, leveraging XML and XSL. Content authors now create one format neutral version of the newsletter and transform it to the required formats through XSL transformation.

Through the results of this effort, TechSpan significantly reduced the work required by PBS.org staff to create newsletters. In addition to the newsletters, TechSpan:

• Enabled the sharing of content between PBS.org and websites managed by PBS affiliated stations,
• Built a workflow and process for expediting the transition of the transcripts from the PBS NewsHour show to the PBS NewsHour website. Lead stories are on the website the same night. The remaining stories are up the next day.
• Made extensive use of Java, XML and XSL to provide a better interface for PBS to manage sponsorship badges,
• Provided PBS.org viewers the capability to request personalized information on PBS programming,

Engenda is performing key functions for PBS, allowing the organization to streamline its process of content authoring and delivery across various departments. It is helping PBS to share content with both internal and external clients. Engenda has been extended to perform key business functions, such as event triggered email notification, automated sub-systems that perform content publishing, transformations and syndication. XML is the medium of content storage making the complete system technology neutral.

Collaborative Process

In addition to the capabilities found in Engenda, the success of the project was in great part due to the collaborative processes established between TechSpan consultants and the PBS team. TechSpan wrote an architecture document detailing how CMS would be deployed within the PBS environment. During each phase, TechSpan worked with the PBS team to further refine the requirements. TechSpan consultants performed the design, and PBS joined TechSpan for the design reviews to ensure the requirements were implemented. The team developed CMS, then unit tested, and function tested the implementation. PBS participated in some of the function tests to ensure the implementation was correct. At the end of the six phases of development, TechSpan consultants performed a system test with PBS performing the user acceptance test. Both PBS and TechSpan provided dedicated resources to ensure open communication and a close working relationship.