Magnolia CMS
Lloyds TSB International Private Banking builds intranet with Magnolia CMS
Lloyds TSB IPB is an international private bank operating in 14 countries on 4 continents. They used to manage their content by having the business users write out drafts in Microsoft Word, which would then be emailed to web masters who would manually re-format it for the Intranet or Internet sites and then upload it by FTP. In 2005, they decided to standardize on a CMS solution to solve this problem once and for all, and chose Magnolia Enterprise Edition. Today, their webmasters are free to actually do web development, and the centralized document store is generating new and exciting efficiencies for their business.
Lloyds TSB International Private Banking
- Zoom
- Lloyds International Private Banking
Lloyds TSB International Private Banking is a division of one of the worlds most trusted financial institutions – the Lloyds TSB Group. Lloyds has been a leading British financial institution since 1765, and the International Private Banking division was founded in 1919. Lloyds TSB Bank is the only British bank to have a AAA credit rating.
World-wide offices
Lloyds offers a complete range of private banking services, adding value through tailor-made solutions. Lloyds TSB has offices in most of the world's leading financial centres: Europe, the Americas, Middle East and Asia.
Managing over 27 Billion Swiss Franc
With over 900 employees serving over 11,000 customers and managing over 27 Billion Swiss Franc (CHF), Lloyds has serious technology needs.
For me Magnolia is a CMS framework and its strength is that it is very open and very easy to integrate with other applications. You have to code the integration but it is very easy and easy to do that in a very standard way.
Gilles Ducret, J2EE Architect, Lloyds TSB IPB
| Client | Lloyds TSB IPB www.lloydstsb-ipb.com |
| Infrastructure | Websphere and Oracle |
| Number of pages | 2500 |
| Number of documents | 4000 |
| Number of content authors | 35 |
| Number of internal site visitors | 1000 |
Case study video and slides
The Situation: Complicated, expensive manual publishing
Highly mobile work force
The Lloyds relationship managers regularly travel the world to remain in touch with their clients. And they use up-to-the minute communication technologies to ensure that physical distance is never an issue.
Complicated, expensive manual process
Lloyds TSB was using a historically grown intranet, based on a Microsoft asp.net/SQL solution with static and old HTML-coded pages. With the time lot of improvements had to be done, but the old system was reaching its limits and became inefficient.
The publishing process was labor-intensive:
- Users prepared Web content in Office documents
- Web master took the content, developed pages and deployed it on test
- Users had to validate it in the test environment
- Web master had to deploy it in production
Duplicated and outdated content
The Intranet and the Internet pages were riddled with duplicated content, some updated to more recent versions while the others lagged. With such a complicated business process, it was difficult to tell who was responsible for keeping content updated and curated day to day.
In a nutshell
The situation before Magnolia CMS had been introduced at Lloyds TSB IPB:
- The IPB web properties had grown much faster than expected
- The Intranet and Internet sites had become very difficult to maintain and manage
- The manual publishing process was labor-intensive
- There were many duplicates and conflicting information between Internet sites and Intranet ones
- Business people did not really own the content - IT did
The Challenge: Consolidate look&feel and simplify publishing processes
Standardized corporate identity
Lloyds was about to embark on a very expensive re-branding project to correspond with new marketing and products. Every web page would have to be updated to fit the new visual branding guidelines. Given the need to standardize look&feel, they decided to adopt a CMS that could give them other advantages too, besides easier re-branding.
Simplify the publishing processes
The old publishing process was cumbersome and expensive. The webmasters spent most of their time posting content themselves, and large amounts of time wasted and errors were introduced in the back and forth communication between marketing and IT. The new system would have to simplify the publishing process enough so that Marketing employees could post new content themselves.
Give to business people the ownership of the Intranet/Internet content
Because of the back and forth over new content is the past, there was ambiguity over who's job it was to keep content up to date. This led to errors not getting fixed, information not getting updated, and stale sites staying on-line. The new system would need to make it possible for marketing employees to be held responsible for the updating of content.
Use a central document store, to publish the same information on different sites
The old process often resulted in different versions of the same document on the internet and the intranet, as some were updated, and others weren't, introducing errors and conflicting messages. The new system would need to reflect updates to a document everywhere that document is posted, in real time. The new system would have to accomplish this while keeping different look and feels accross the Intranet and the Internet site.
Have enterprise support contracts available
Many Open Source projects have no enterprise support packages. In order to secure vendor support for bug fixing, new feature development and other needs, the new system would have to offer a comprehensive enterprise support plan.
Fit a very limited budget
Because the CMS system was being implemented to help with the re-branding project, it had to fit within the budget. Every dollar spent on licensing or Enterprise support would have to pay for itself in savings in the man hours needed for the rebranding project. The system could not introduce new costs in terms of security or integration.
Use the JSR 170 standard to prevent lock-in
Many systems use proprietary standards for their document store, locking companies into old solutions or requiring expensive and error-prone custom integration work to migrate away. The new solution would have to use the Industry-standard JSR 170 for it's document store, to ease integration and prevent lock in.
Integrate well with the existing J2EE-based environment
Lloyds did not want to set up and maintain a new application infrastructure for it's new CMS. Any CMS chosen would have to integrate well with the existing Oracle/WebSphere environment.
The Solution: Magnolia Enterprise Edition
Technical benefits
Both the public site and private Intranet are now 100% managed by Magnolia. This has resulted in a host of integration benefits.
Support for security-relevant technologies
Most of the time, when transitioning from a system where only highly trained IT pros have power, to a system that empowers each contributer, security is a concern. Not for Magnolia. By integrating Magnolia with Lloyds already existing LDAP directory to handle roles and permissions, and turning on https-by-default for editing, Lloyds managed to dramatically expand participation with no effect on security.
Simplification of the publication processes
Magnolia has 1-click publishing that allows knowledge workers to publish directly to the Intranet site, the Internet site, and the Private Internet site from the same interface. Pages and documents are themed and formatted differently for each site automatically, so that everything looks consistent on each site.
One single repository of information
Because of Magnolia's standardized and documented API's and plugin architecture, Lloyds was able to easy link this repository with their other systems using XML. For example, Lloyds TSB has an internal application that they use for financial analysts to share recommendations with the client-facing side of the business. Magnolia allows for the rationale behind the recommendations to be easily entered directly into the CMS by the analysts, and the proprietary application can link directly to the corresponding rationales in Magnolia.
Magnolia is extremely scalable
During a upgrade migration, Lloyds published 2,500 pages and 4,000 documents in 2 hours. Magnolia scaled to the required workload without necessary intervention. Even with custom extensions and themes, Magnolia has scaled to meet every challenge Lloyds throws at it.
New functionality: Document Management, News, Wikis
This has resulted in advances such as the marketing team being able to market directly to existing customers on the Private Internet, sharing with them analysis from Internal Intranet documents and pointing them to public sites. These internal marketing campaigns can happen easily without needing Web master support.
Our webmaster had only PHP skills. After attending a quick class in Java, he now develops everything in Java and his work has become quite impressive in a very short time.
Gilles Ducret, J2EE Architect, Lloyds TSB IPB
Business benefits
Magnolia has enabled huge productivity gains, saving Lloyds money by eliminating hundreds of hours of wasteful business process, and by increasing the amount that each individual employee has the time and power to accomplish! By enabling Marketing personnel to post and manage their own content, significant value has been created for Lloyds.
Users now own the process, and the content
By simplifying the business processes around posting content, users now have absolute surety as to who owns content: If you wrote it, you own it. All of the time that used to be dedicated to emailing, calling, and waiting for IT can now be used to create and organize content. This has increased productivity and efficiency for both the marketing department and the IT department.
Webmasters can now spend time on web development
Because they are no longer tied down updating sites and uploading new content, Webmasters can do more development. This has allowed them to implement new functionality to the website, at no extra cost to Lloyds, because the time was recovered from inefficient processes. New functionality includes: Wiki's, Blogs, better themes, better customer engagement features.
Re-invigorated marketing
Because Marketing employees can post directly to the internet, the intranet and the private internet, they are taking initiative and directly improving the products. For example, analysts who post a report on the intranet, can now also have clients see it when they are logged in to the private internet site! Having easy channels of communication between analysts, other marketing workers, and the customers has increased data flow and improved the customer experience.
Conclusion
Lloyds TSB has moved all of their web pages and document management onto Magnolia Enterprise Edition. The simplified publishing process has eliminated the inefficient pre-existing process, and resulted in major gains in productivity.
By implementing Magnolia CMS, Lloyds Private Bank has improved almost every aspect of their business. Their employees are more productive, their customer service people better enabled, and their customers are more informed. Magnolia has transformed Lloyd's business in ways that could not have even been predicted on the onset of the migration project. By enabling the users to administer their own content, Magnolia changed the fundamental business processes at Lloyds for the better.
Further information
- Learn more about Magnolia Enterprise Edition
- From the creator of Magnolia: support and services
- Find a Magnolia Partner close to you