SharePoint Public Website Development for a Canadian Tea & Coffee Manufacturer

Summary

A century-old Canadian tea and coffee manufacturer ran one of its brand websites on a PHP CMS that was too complex to manage and needed constant developer support. INNERLUXES migrated the site to SharePoint, deploying and tuning the SharePoint farm, moving all content across, and configuring the CMS so non-technical teams can manage products, brands, and pages easily — with English/French versioning, geo-location, Google Analytics, and a responsive, mobile-friendly design, delivered on time.

About the Client

The Client is a Canada-headquartered company that has manufactured and supplied tea, coffee, and other beverages to retailers, foodservice chains, and hospitality facilities across North America for more than a century. With offices and manufacturing centers in the US and Canada, it owns a variety of tea and coffee brands and pioneers innovative beverage technologies and equipment.

A PHP CMS That Was Too Hard to Maintain

One of the Client's brands ran a PHP-based website to present its teas and coffees to customers and consumers. Because the existing CMS was too complex to manage and required permanent assistance from PHP developers, the Client decided to change content management platforms. They chose SharePoint for an easy-to-use, manageable CMS, and engaged INNERLUXES to build a public website on SharePoint, migrate the content from the PHP site, and tune the SharePoint CMS.

Migration to a Self-Manageable SharePoint CMS

The project began with business analysis: INNERLUXES's analysts produced a comprehensive implementation plan, a detailed description of business requirements, and the solution's conceptual architecture. With that approved, the SharePoint team deployed and tuned a new SharePoint farm, helped the Client set up and configure the environment, and migrated all content from the PHP CMS. The team then tuned the CMS so the site's components and content are easy to manage:

• Static content and page labels.
• The main-page carousel.
• Products and product categories.
• Brands and flavors with direct links to the online store.
• Sales channels and stores.
• An FAQ section, and more.

Front-end work converted all UI elements and functionality — including geo-location — from PHP to SharePoint, added website language versioning for English and French, and integrated Google Analytics, while responsive design made the site mobile-accessible.

An On-Time, Easy-to-Manage Website

• The collaboration of INNERLUXES's business analysts, SharePoint development team, and the Client's stakeholders made the project a success.
• At closing, INNERLUXES provided a complete set of reports describing all implemented requirements and development activities.
• The solution was deployed, migrated, and tuned according to the project plan and delivered to the Client on time.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2010, C#, .NET, JavaScript.