In order to secure its market position on the Internet as well, Bibliomed decided to create the station24.de portal, providing an extensive range of services revolving around care and health topics. The open source Liferay portal was opted for as technology basis. In assigning mgm technology partners, Bibliomed chose a project partner that could already point to years of experience in the introduction of online business concepts, also based on Liferay. The station24.de platform went live as planned in September 2010.

At the outset: “How are we to accomplish all this in only six months?“

Our initial gratification on Bibliomed’s decision for mgm was somewhat short lived, however. In view of the tight project duration and the specified budget, our team – consisting of a project manager, a Liferay architect and three technical engineers – had to get off to a very rapid start. When assessing the detail specifications it already became clear to us that the multitude of functions would call for special efforts:

• Expanding the online offerings
  Orientation of the information offerings including more than 2,000 specialist and trade articles to the target groups of care personnel, physicians and care facility management.
• Development of new marketing scenarios
  Commercial marketing of the content in the form of subscriptions for individual users and groups. In addition, care news, a job market with geographic search functions, an extensive event calendar as well as a media center with video, downloads and series of images are also provided as value added services.
• Cross-media approach
  In connection with the integrated online shop there is a natural interaction between print and online media, enabling Bibliomed to market its own specialist print publications. Contents are always presented in a context and topic relevant manner, and are linked to personalized Web 2.0 services (such as ‘bookmark’, ‘rate’ or ‘recommend’, for example).
• Search and find
  Thanks to the preview and grouping function integrated into the search options, the search results can be displayed in a structured manner, also in the case of complex questions and searches. To this end the integrated Lucene search function in Liferay was considerably extended by mgm.

Innovative teaser concept enables editors to work intuitively and flexibly

A building block system of various templates was created directly in Liferay in order to present the editorial content and specialist articles. Thanks to the presentation logic developed, it is possible to add teasers to contents in the desired context and format in Station24. The operation is so simple that the Bibliomed editors were able to use the system independently after only half a day of training.

In technical terms, the presentation information on the interface of a teaser (such as structure, size, format etc.) is directly shown in a Liferay portlet. When a new teaser is to be activated, all that the editors have to do is read in the content via the API of the CMS.

Planning security guaranteed in the project with mgm technology partners

“We consistently geared the development of Station24 to customer wishes, instead of a technology orientation“, as Armen Markarian, project manager at mgm explained.

In the course of project work the customer requirements were rapidly visualized by prototypes that were also used as basis for discussions in the daily coordination with engineers. In this way the entire team (also at Bibliomed) acquired a feeling at an early stage for the subsequent user experience both from the end customer and editorial viewpoint. In the realization of the platform targeted investments were made where it was possible to generate additional value, such as the teaser concept developed. Otherwise, the use of Liferay standards (such as personalization, shop etc.) helped to reduce development input and costs.

Customer satisfaction

“We are very pleased with our joint project success. In mgm technology partners we have found a fast track, high performance service provider and we hope that we will continue to join forces in further developing our online business over the long term. We have laid the foundation with the first project phase that was concluded precisely on time and within the specified budget“, as Martin Elting, Technical project manager at Bibliomed, enthusiastically commented on the positive cooperation with the mgm team to date.

* This reference has been officially confirmed by Bibliomed.