How The Global Fund uses Umbraco to power their multilingual website with ease

Selecting the right CMS has never been easy and the marketplace remains confusing, crowded and full of new buzzwords.

At the same time, selecting the right one has probably never been more important with increasing demands and expectations both internally and externally. A good website and a good digital platform to power it five years ago doesn’t necessarily cut it in 2024. Many organisations have found themselves with massive technical debt and forced to migrate to another solution.

In a recent member’s call we heard an interesting non-profit case study from Web Team Leader Genc Kastrati at The Global Fund in Geneva. They’ve been using commercial open source CMS Umbraco to power their multilingual website for over 7 years and are quite happy with it.

The Global Fund is a Geneva-based worldwide movement to defeat HIV, TB and malaria and ensure a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all. Let’s start with a big picture of the Umbraco setup at The Global Fund.

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What can we learn from the University of Copenhagen CMS selection process

It’s quite unusual for a CMS selection process to take 5 years, but as the digital platform keeps growing in importance, year long evaluations are likely to get more common in the future.

In particular for large, complex and international organisations, where the task of migrating thousands of pages and custom-built development is a long, time-consuming and expensive one.

I recently spoke to Johannes Nygaard who is Chief Digital Advisor at the University of Copenhagen and a part of their CMS selection project. This project started back in 2017 and recently led to the selection of open source CMS TYPO3 as their new digital platform.

Let’s take a step-by-step look at what happened and see what you might be able to use in your own selection processes.

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Digital Experience Technology 2023 Themes

Enabling the ongoing evolution of Audi’s digital experience and creating robust, efficient and scalable technology solutions is a big part of the mission for the Digital Experience Tech team at Audi of America.

Amanda Skura heads up the team which focuses on the enablement and implementation of marketing and CRM tech alongside product development for digital business platforms.

In a recent informal member call, she shared a brief update on her work and plans for 2023. We started the conversation on how the mission connects to their everyday work.

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Composable design throughout the stack at Salling Group

Having multiple projects with similar specs often leads to duplicate implementations or code. Similarly having different vendors, but a wish to align can be challenging.

At Danish retailer Salling Group, Frontend Manager Martin Hobert and his team solved this by implementing Shared Modules that work in a composable fashion.

In a recent member call, Martin shared a deep dive into the thoughts that went into creating the solution that they work with today. 

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Diversity & inclusion at Telia

“The most important thing in diversity & inclusion is to speak less and do more”

It is hard to disagree with the impactful opening line by Chris Hovde in our recent member call, but how do you actually take diversity and inclusion to the next level?

Chris is a diversity lead at the award-winning Swedish multinational telecommunications company Telia. They have been crowned as the most family-friendly workplace and as a rainbow hero. It’s been a multi-year journey and as Chris said, they are not done yet.

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Leading design at Verizon

As the Head of Design at telecommunications conglomerate Verizon in New York City, Richard Dalton leads a sizable team of 600 designers working at the forefront of Verizon's digital transformation. They aim to create exquisite experiences for their customers, but how do they do it?

In a recent member call, Richard offered a brief and informal Q&A session, where he covered DesignOps, strengthening the design muscle and some of the recent design trends.

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How Universal Robots works with UX and Design

“Nothing today is designed for old people”

For our final member conference call of 2021, we heard the story about how Anja Saabye is building a UX and Design team at Universal Robots. Universal Robots is based in Odense, Denmark and works with industrial automation. They are known for producing a robotic arm that is characterized by being extremely versatile and easy to use in day-to-day production.

Anja Saabye joined as Head of UX in late 2020 and has since rapidly grown her team. She joined with an agency background, including almost 6 years at Hesehus. She firmly believes that designers are the most important people in any company.

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How Pernod Ricard built a digital platform to quickly create new websites

As a large, global and complex organisation working with consumer goods, how do you both consolidate your brand websites and make it easy to create new ones? In particular, when brand management is distributed globally and websites developed by different teams in different countries, things can quickly get both painstakingly expensive and, to put it mildly tricky to manage.

French-based global spirits company Pernod Ricard was facing exactly this challenge 2 years ago and looking for a content management system that they could use and scale to meet their requirements.

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Chatbots during COVID19 at Danish insurance firm Tryg

With 3 chatbots in production and one more launched during the height of COVID19 in April, Danish insurance firm Tryg saw a substantial usage increase and also learned a few valuable lessons.

Aiste Hoffbeck is digital front runner at Tryg in Copenhagen and recently joined our member conference call series to share insights on their chatbots.

Read my notes from the call, including some additional perspectives from the Q&A.

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SFMOMA selected Kentico Kontent to separate content from code

Technology decisions have huge impact and with the seemingly never ending growth in tools to power the digital experience, it has not become easier for buyers to navigate a crowded marketplace.  

At SFMOMA, one of the largest museums in the US, they needed an improved ticketing part of their website. Rather than the usual Swiss-army knife approach of “The One CMS To Rule Everything”, they went looking for a new solution where their editors could focus on content, while their developers could keep developing using familiar code.

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How the story of a goldfish will change internal communication

During the last ten years our attention span has decreased from twelve to eight seconds, Microsoft argues in a recent study. During the same time the attention span of a goldfish has remained stable at nine seconds. Obviously, the goldfish hasn’t had a bunch of new options like social media and smartphones to entertain itself during the last ten years - compared to us.

Distraction is the price we pay for having all the great digital tools at hand. According to Jonas Bladt Hansen, digital consultant at Danish dairy giant Arla and speaker at the Boye Aarhus 15 conference, this has significant consequences for the future of internal communication.

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Demonstrating Yammer’s business value

By Janus Boye

What can you do to create a flourishing and responsive Yammer service at your organization? How do you get your co-workers to embrace the platform and prove its business value to senior management?

Lesley Crook, IC Digital Lean Strategist and speaker at Boye Philadelphia 15 conference, tells the story of how GSK’s Yammer service demonstrated business value by adopting her ‘qualitative’ model in this posting. The below photo is from her popular conference presentation back in May. 

Read How GSK works with Yammer for additional details

Lean ways of working

GSK has a gold standard continuous improvement model called “Accelerated Delivery & Performance” (ADP), which is based on the Toyota Production System (TPS) model. It combines the best of Project Management, Organisational Development and Lean Sigma knowledge networking fundamentals. Coached in GSK businesses but not broadly encouraged in the internal communications area. Being curious I signed up for on-the-job Lean training with mentors and coaches. This opened my eyes to a different way of working and an output of mine was the creation of a unique Yammer “qualitative” business value model.

ESN’s have only previously been determined by using quantitative measurements such as the size of the network and the number of ‘posts’ within groups. Although these measurements are important they need to be put into context.

My model helped to do just that. Yammer group owners are asked a series of short questions that extract key information about their group in relation to areas such as business strategy, project management, organisational development and business transformation, plus cultural behaviours and values. The responses demonstrate how successful Yammer groups are providing real business benefits and helping employees to understand the relevance of Yammer to themselves and their work.

The model also introduces and raises the relevance of “business intelligent #hash tags” that enable searching and data mining strategic content. It helps to share knowledge networking stories cultural sentiments and captures meaningful, actionable tacit insights - not data. It enables working out loud in a network, creating a positive but somewhat disruptive flow - working up and out of silos. These stories can be shared back into the business.

#Yammer50k campaign

November 2014 the output of the model was our global communication campaign. This celebrated reaching the quantitative achievement of 50,000 registered users and demonstrated Yammers qualitative business value. Me and Matt Bartow took-over our intranet homepage and shared 10 Yammer success stories that spanned R&D, manufacturing, sales, marketing and corporate communications.

Each story contains a senior leader “golden“ quote describing how Yammer supported business objectives and company values. Also, how Yammer groups made their part of the business more “responsive” e.g., decreased email trails and increased collaboration by working across business, time zones and geographical boundaries enabled by powerful translate functionality when appropriate.

Leaning up your enterprise social network

Lesley’s model has been endorsed in the private and public sector, Yammer Microsoft management and a Cambridge University academic, but how would her model apply to your organisation? 

Feel free to leave Lesley or Matt a comment below