Elekta Scales for Enterprise Growth with Magnolia CMS

Elekta is a human care company pioneering significant innovations and clinical solutions for treating cancer and brain disorders. The company develops sophisticated tools and treatment planning systems for radiation therapy and radiosurgery, as well as workflow-enhancing software systems across the spectrum of cancer care.

Zoom

Elekta

Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Elekta is a global corporation with around 3,300 employees.

Statistics

Client	Elekta
URL	www.elekta.com
Number of visits per month	125,000
Number of pageviews per month	300,000
Number of site pages	2,500

 

After only four years of use, Elekta’s PHP-based CMS was found to lack the reliability, flexibility and scalability required to run the company’s global corporate website. Their proprietary system had grown increasingly expensive, due to the constant unplanned fixes, on top of locked-in hosting and backup fees.

We were basically hoodwinked. After promises the system could handle all our product categorization requirements, as well as our design and integration needs, the site regularly fell apart. As soon as we fixed one feature, another would break. It cost a fortune to continuously re-write code, and then have the vendor validate it for us.

Andrew Rodgers, Manager, Global Web & Multimedia

It also proved difficult to incorporate the websites of recent acquisitions – including Resonant Medical, IMPAC Medical Systems, Computerized Medical Systems, and Beijing Medical Equipment Institute (BMEI) – to provide a unified web experience across multiple languages and brands.

With so many new products to promote, Elekta needed a CMS that could easily provide every product category with its own landing page, act as an effective entry point, and deliver content tailored to the needs of each visitor. The company could then optimize these pages to target potential visitors and enhance overall search engine rankings.

The search for a new CMS

Elekta decided that it was time to search for a new CMS that could meet their expanding business requirements:

• Flexible & Scalable, to accommodate unknown future content needs and acquired company websites
• Easy to use, to aid in quick integration and time to market, and lower training costs
• Java-based, to save time and expense by enabling their existing Java development team to customize the CMS
• Open Source, to ensure a secure and flexible standards-based solution while benefiting from an open community environment

The Elekta IT team drew up an extensive list of feature requirements, and began internal tests on a number of CMS solutions, including Joomla, Drupal, and TYPO3.

With the new Magnolia system, Elekta was able to pull all its acquired companies’ websites into the Elekta.com family.

Developers were especially happy with the power of the Magnolia toolset, including the RSS aggregator and data sections. They found Magnolia to be so flexible and scalable that they could satisfy every site modification request from marketing without a problem.

The ability to pull all our acquired company websites together under Elekta.com without problems is a triumph. There was a feeling that when we purchased these companies they were still very much separate entities. With Magnolia, we could bring them all together as part of the entire Elekta family. I am confidant, thanks to Magnolia’s scalability, that we can easily integrate new sites in the future.

Andrew Rodgers, Manager, Global Web & Multimedia

Integration

By connecting to Elekta’s various data sources, including HubSpot and Salesforce.com, Elekta.com has become the backbone of Elekta’s Customer Lifecycle Management System (CLMS).

Time-savings

The Magnolia Standard Templating Kit (STK) proved to be an especially powerful tool. Its customizable web page templates for common uses saves time and ensures that site authors stick to predefined page guidelines.

In the beginning, we didn’t recognize the advantage. It looked difficult and felt like you were forced into a layout and branding structure. Now, it’s hard to imagine how we would have created the site otherwise. The templating kit saved us an enormous amount of time and provided everyone with a unified structure to work to.

Tobias Müller, Developer, Global Web & Multimedia

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization was also greatly improved. With so many product categories there were many possible landing pages, so SEO was key. User-friendly links automatically replaced the old illegible ones while the system now automatically prompts authors to enter keywords and descriptions, so that no page is left un-optimized. Pages now load faster too, not only enhancing the visitor experience but also enhancing search engine ranking, since page load time is an indicator of ‘page authority’.