Development of a digital platform to manage a website network for a B2B corporation.

Mitsubishi Electric is a $30 billion global corporation and ranks among the largest electrical manufacturers in the world. From innovating the future of the motor vehicle with their Automotive division to sustainably warming homes with their Ecodan Heat Pumps to communication satellites circling the globe, Mitsubishi Electric’s technology can be found in a diverse range of products people use every day.

We had been working with Mitsubishi Electric for many years when they approached us to develop a solution that would homogenise their process for creating and managing their network of websites.  This secure and scalable open-source content management platform had to support many websites across different divisions and languages, campaign-centric microsites, product information management resources and native mobile apps.

Fully featured yet easy to use collaboratively or independently and robust yet flexible to enable rapid creation of new websites and indexing of around 500 GB of documents, the platform had to be virtualisation-ready to future-proof for long-term network management strategies.

As a highly recognisable corporate citizen, the platform had to meet stringent security requirements and pass regular security vulnerability inspections while also enforcing strict corporate UI brand and accessibility guidelines.

For web development projects, we favour the waterfall project management model. This linear approach divides the project into five phases.

Requirements
With multiple divisions, Business Units, Corporate Communications and IT Teams involved in the project, the discovery phase was extensive and incorporated detailed information gathering from various Product Managers and Engineering Departments. This enabled us to produce a Technical and Creative specification document for consultation, refinement and approval.

Design
The client’s extensive corporate guidelines, divisional and product marketing strategies, visitor persona engagement and complex information architecture were all thoroughly considered when developing first-round creative concepts. These passed through several further rounds of refinements in collaboration with the client before approval was agreed to move into implementation.

Implementation
The user interface was hand-coded using the popular Bootstrap HTML, CSS and JS Library to ensure multi-device optimisation.  The platform was developed on an MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework using Open Source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) technologies.

Core functionality – the user interface, administrator permissions, page management and multisite deployment – was prioritised and released to the client at an early stage in the project’s journey for initial assessment and feedback.  This collaborative approach continued as the project progressed to the development of dynamic translations, personalised PDF generation, interactive location maps and native mobile Apps.

Verification
Upon completion of the agreed pre-launch functionality and internal testing, the platform was released to the client for User Acceptance Testing and migration to the production hosting environment.  A security vulnerability assessment was completed ahead of launch.

Maintenance
As a business-critical solution, a Service Level Agreement provides the assurance of an uptime guarantee, no-downtime platform and server upgrades, emergency response and disaster recovery.

Since launch, the platform has run around 65 Mitsubishi Electric web properties across Europe and served hundreds of thousands of monthly page requests. It also runs a product information management system with around 1 million continually increasing pages that serve the content to native iOS, Android and Windows Apps.

It is used reliably daily by dozens of the client’s administrators – onsite and offsite – through a secure process managed in collaboration with Mitsubishi Electric.

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