What is Portal NOW ?

When it comes to laying the foundation of your website, the separation of content from presentation provides the maximum benefits. That’s why we teamed up with IBM WebSphere to help businesses like yours create dynamic websites with this rule in mind.

IBM WebSphere Portal NOW is our answer; we can create or enhance enterprise-class portal business solutions for your organization in just 16 days. We start with what you have on your own server and then use Portal NOW to enable your desired solution. And we do turn-key, month-to-month contracts so you don’t have to spend a bundle up front for this kind of solution.

Hearst Direct Publishing…

The Hearst Corporation knows media. The American conglomerate is one of the oldest and most respected businesses of our time.  And their publishing and advertising markets are successful at both the local and national scales. But they knew that in order to maintain their competitive advantage, their online presence needed to match their off-line accomplishments.

Hearst Direct Publishing is a subsidiary that handles the newspaper division’s print, mail and distribution efforts on the local level.  As the department grew, HDP discovered that a few issues needed to be addressed. They wanted to have a more innovative online image for the customer and an improved information sharing method for the employees.

Element Blue solution

That’s where we stepped in. We designed a self-service web portal where print-based advertisers could easily upload and distribute print ad assets. This eliminated the hassle of sending large files via email or physical mail. HDP customers can login to a simple yet engaging site that is entirely self service and get everything they need from design reviews to comments to feedback.

How did we do this? Our goal at Element Blue is always efficiency. So instead of completely ripping out what’s already there, we work with what you already have and make it better. And that’s what we did with Hearst Direct Publishing.  We added custom software templates from Portal NOW to the web content components they already had in place.

The benefits

Hearst Direct Publishing can now offer a high-touch relationship with its customers with a 10-15% productivity gain for its employees. Since the site is a self-service portal, this frees up more time for Hearst reps to focus on increasing revenue and not tedious operation tasks.