REFERENCE CASE STUDY
The fruitful collaboration of Open-Xchange and 711media resulted in the sustainable development of an all-inclusive digital ecosystem. The new solution was completely redesigned, efficiently structured and features a uniform design. It consists of the following components:
Website
Blogs
Newsrooms
Landing- and Eventpages
Mailings
Career- and HR-platforms
Internal areas
Rafael Laguna, Managing Director of Open-Xchange: "Freedom and openness are the philosophy behind the technology we use and the value we deliver to the market." Open-Xchange stands for an open, free and secure internet without borders. The company opposes monopolistic structures and develops only open platforms that anyone can use. 711media serves as a digital lead agency for Open-Xchange and develops the digital ecosystem for a company that has broken new ground right from the start.
www.open-xchange.comThe TYPO2website was connected via API to the CleverReach newsletter tool and complemented with a specially developed solution for registering and managing newsletter subscriptions.
The Customer Portal is an area with limited access, and it is divided into customers and premium customers subareas. To make the Portal more customer-oriented and update the specific content, 711media developed further portal elements.
The new HR portal with application management was developed from scratch on TYPO3.
711media designed an event page management for Open-Xchange website to display the regular events in Europe and the United States.
The newly developed newsroom on the Open-Xchange website combines information from many sources, like blogs, press releases, and social media channels. The information in this section is grouped and filtered, and is presented in a pleasant animated view, including reloadable (AJAX) articles.
Instead of filling the page headers with generic stock images, Open-Xchange together with 711media developed an eye-candy concept. These eye-candies enriched the themes and content of the pages with animated vector graphics to make them more visually appealing.
The search function in the newly developed website covers not only the content of the website but also integrates other Open-Xchange platforms, such as forum.open-xchange.com, oxpedia.org, documentation.open-xchange.com. The implemented autocomplete feature simplifies the use of the search, and all the search results are properly categorized. This function is using Apache Nudge, as well as a specially designed and configured crawler.
711media developed a special microsite for the open-source mail server software suite Dovecot. It handles around 75% of the world's IMPA e-mail traffic.
OX's chat-over-IMAP technology is an open chat standard for messengers, which can be communicated across clients, unlike Silos clients from WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, etc.
In the beginning, Open-Xchange owned decentralized island solutions in different locations. They aimed to fundamentally rebuild and structurize their complex and outdated system. Open-Xchange were looking for a reliable technical partner to entrust to them this complicated but resolvable task. After the evaluation of extensive technical expertise, Open-Xchange decided to partner with 711media. 711 media successfully solved the tough project’s challenges and became the digital strategist for Open-Xchange.
The previous website of Open-Xchange was based on their own Ruby solution. Over time it became outdated, unstable, and often went offline. To properly cure this unacceptable situation, 711media started the collaboration with the initial hotfix. They stabilized the wavering system to prevent the website’s disconnection from the network and started planning its redesign and relaunch.
The large opening workshop of the combined teams took place in a feudal setting: at Schloss Solitude near Stuttgart. During the workshop, it turned out, that the new digital principles need to be developed from scratch together with numerous additions and flanged systems. The teams confronted a difficult task: to create a stable, technically clean and user-friendly digital ecosystem with integrated content.
To ensure the long-term technical stability of the content management system, the teams opted for TYPO3. Prior to the migration to the new system, 711media conducted an extensive analysis to remove orphaned pages and critical backlinks, as well as revised the structure of the content and the design. In particular, the team combined and integrated individual pages into the unified main page to ensure consistent corporate identity. Furthermore, after the migration, they offered training to the Open-Xchange employees on how to operate the new system. The new system is:
Future-proof
Mobile-enabled newsletter templates with CleverReach and bug tracking with help desk
Fast
Short load times and high page performance with Cloudflare
Reliable
Professional hosting on top maintained, secure servers
The next task for 711media was to develop a common platform for the Open-Xchange community on this portal. This has to be a form of a digital place for know-how and the possibility to ask direct questions to experts. The platform was intended to be fast, easy, and open for everyone, so that all its users can leave comments everywhere and see the answers of other users. This platform needed to ensure a live experience exchange and quick knowledge transfer. 711media successfully developed the complete platform: from ideation and design to technical implementation.
Due to many different domains Open-Xchange looked differently at all locations: several blogs, FAQ sections, and other outsourced websites. One of the tasks was to reach a holistic appearance and reduce these visually different digital islands to a common denominator. In order to ensure visual consistency and unity, the 711media team developed a comprehensive style guide. The brand-new style guide is:
Direct
Everyone involved in the project can access the digital guide quickly and easily
Detailed
The guide contains descriptive and detailed documentation of each element, as well as an explanation of each state and behavior
Scalable
The digital guide is sustainable, adaptable, scalable and long-term focused
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