1. Productive Marketing with Content Management
14 November 2013 Ian Norton – Senior Web Architect Alfresco

2. Introduction
Ian Norton Senior Web Architect at Alfresco Corporate Marketing
Good afternoon and thanks for coming to our talk on productive marketing with content management – I hope you’ll find it useful,
My name's Ian Norton, I've been privileged to hold the position of Senior Web Architect at Alfresco for three exciting years.
I’d like to welcome Aaron Heath from Saks Fifth Avenue to Alfresco Summit, I’ll let Aaron introduce himself in a moment, but it’s great to have him here to hear about his real world experience of using Alfresco.
I spent some time reading about Saks ahead of this talk, about their solution and there were a lot of parallels there between the two companies. Both are empowering business users to take control of their web content, to keep it up to date and to speed up that process of working on it and the end customer being able to enjoy it.
My day to day job is working with people throughout Alfresco which can be anywhere from Tokyo to California (and all the bits to the left and the right) to help deliver our brand in local markets and to keep our web properties up to date both technically and visually.
In the three years I’ve been with Alfresco we’ve seen some big changes, the company has doubled in size staff wise and our web infrastructure is almost completely different.

3. Agenda Alfresco.com in the past. Alfresco in 2013. Collaboration. Demo
I’m going to kick off by talking about how Alfresco.com was setup in the past, the challenges that we had and how we used our own software and collaborated with other open source software vendors to solve out challenges.
Then I’m going to talk about how we use Alfresco in the Cloud for rapid prototyping to improve conversions on Alfresco.com and the metrics we’ve improved as a result of this.
Finally – we’ll move on to a joint Q&A for the session.

4. Internal Alfresco Share
Alfresco.com
Alfresco.com/fr
Alfresco.com/de
Alfresco.com/es
Alfresco.com/it
Alfresco.com/jp
We kept 6 different websites running, one for each different language that we offered. Despite being primarily a document management company, we had no quick or reliable way to get documents on the website in an automated way.
The process was:
People work on the file in Alfresco Share
Once the file is ready the owner lets the web team know where on the website it needs to go.
The web team copy the file from Alfresco share by downloading it to desktop and then uploading to Alfresco.com.
There was no real connection between the two, any edits to the files would kick off that process again, it was a completely manual process
Internal Alfresco Share

5. Internal Alfresco Share
Broken Process
Internal Alfresco Share
Alfresco.com
Manual processes are always open to human error, people forget, people go on holiday, people have late nights.

6. Publishing content with Alfresco
So how did we solve this challenge?
We started to look at our own stack of software to see how we could make it work for us, rather than us working around it.
Firstly we created an Alfresco Share server running Alfresco, for each website that we have we created a sister Alfresco Share site, so right now we have 4 Alfresco sites:
WWW
Summit
Devcon 2012
Partners
I’m going to focus in on the most pertinent one of those – Alfresco Summit 2013, it’s the best realisation of solving our challenges to date.

7. Alfresco & Drupal Real World
Cloud
Sync
CMIS
Alfresco in the cloud
Alfresco on-premise
summit.alfresco.com
We have three pieces of technology in our stack sitting on different servers, there are two that are accessible to people external to Alfresco, these are our cloud server and Drupal.
Speak about system account.

8. Alfresco & Drupal Real World
All of the session pages for Alfresco Summit (should) have the presentations at the bottom of the session page,
We invited all of the Alfresco Summit Speakers to a cloud site, there they can download PowerPoint templates and are asked to place their slides in a specific folder, this content doesn’t have to be slides, code examples, audio and other documents can be added here.

9. So here’s our standard Summit page, hopefully you’ve seen this and hopefully you’ll write something nice in the review after my talk.

10. The main text on the page is a drupal text field just like any other Drupal web page, but below it we’ve added an additional field for CMIS folders, this one here is pointing to the folder ID for my presentation on the Summit Alfresco repository.
This is being displayed using the theme in the CMIS Views module of Drupal, there are four built in themes, and if you wanted to you can add your own and have it appear completely differently.

11. The CMIS Object
If we look closer you’ll see how the properties have mapped over between the two, we have the title field, description, last modified and the size.
We’ve also gained a small thumbnail of the front page of the presentation, Alfresco generates these after new files are uploaded on to the server, this is a rendition and we can configure Alfresco to be pretty clever with these, I’ll talk more about that shortly. As a developer I have full access to properties in a CMIS object.

12. Alfresco & Drupal Real World
Cloud
Sync
CMIS
Alfresco in the cloud
Alfresco on-premise
summit.alfresco.com
If a speaker goes in and updates their presentation on the Alfresco in the cloud site, it’ll kick off a cloud sync process that updates the Alfresco on-premise install, next time Drupal looks at the Alfresco repository it’ll get the new version of the document.
Short demo?

13. Collaboration
The second thing that Alfresco’s become increasingly important for is Collaboration between remote teams.
A lot of us work in different places, there are 4 staff working on Alfresco.com, and we all work out different time zones and locations – meetings and being able to provide quick and valuable feedback is essential to getting our job done.
We use Alfresco in the cloud to work on new designs to trial on our site, these can be anything but tend to be marketing focused like landing pages.

14. Collaboration
So if Alfresco.com need a new homepage – we speak to one of our designers, one’s based in Atlanta and the other just outside of London, we upload rough sketches and or wireframes for the designer and discuss the work over Skype.

15. Collaboration Insert graphic of Share
The designer sets to work, and uploads designs to Share – we quickly iterate over Skype and work through designs until we’re happy that we have some options to present to the business owner.
Feedback’s read by the designer who revises if needed and we then hold a quick meeting with the business owner to see if we should proceed in taking the design into code and normally introduce an A/B test to check what we’re doing’s helping not hurting our metrics
The business owners then ‘like’ their favorites, and use the comments field to provide quick feedback

16. Collaboration Insert graphic of new home page
Feedback’s read by the designer who revises if needed and we then hold a quick meeting with the business owner to see if we should proceed in taking the design into code and normally introduce an A/B test to check what we’re doing’s helping not hurting our metrics

17. Collaboration Insert graphic of new contact / enterprise trial page
Feedback’s read by the designer who revises if needed and we then hold a quick meeting with the business owner to see if we should proceed in taking the design into code and normally introduce an A/B test to check what we’re doing’s helping not hurting our metrics

18. Collaboration
Feedback’s read by the designer who revises if needed and we then hold a quick meeting with the business owner to see if we should proceed in taking the design into code and normally introduce an A/B test to check what we’re doing’s helping not hurting our metrics

19. Metrics 275%+ increase in active prospects browsing the site.
99% Increase in contact us submissions.
45% Increase in Enterprise Trial downloads.
I’m going to end on the numbers – and I think they speak for themselves, we’ve been able to get changes out really quickly, we don’t need to wait for meetings, the feedback and direction’s all stored in Alfresco.

20. Questions