Kraft Foods and Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) gave excellent presentations on how they have adopted SharePoint solutions. Each took different approaches in deploying the platform. Kraft focused on Web Content Management and CCE deployed using Business Product Online Services BPOS for employee team sites, collaboration, search, calendar shares and business intellegence.
In both cases the organizations selected SharePoint as not only a technology but a platform to enable their employees to engage more collaboratively. Both organizations are eager to continue building out cutting edge ECM, WCM, BI and Social media applications on SharePoint 2010.
Kraft Foods Digital Marketing group led by Rose Moda worked with Blackwell Consulting and Razorfish to deliver an extensbile, flexible and highly scalable web content management platform. The customer facing websites are crisp, easily updated, brand flexible and powered by SharePoint.
Kraft is the second largest domestic food manufacturer and distributor with an annual revenues of 42B. They have some of the best known brands that you find in your refrigerator or pantry everyday. Including Maxwell House, Oscar Meyer, Oreo, Philedelphia Cream Cheese and Nabisco. 40 of the Kraft brands are over 100 years old. Kraft has 168 manufacturing and food distribution facilities worldwide.
With 270 sites globally and 3 different (web) Content Management Systems, Kraft forcasts a $2.2M cost saving over 2 years using the SharePoint ECM platform. They are currently running 64-bit versions of MS SharePoint 07 (MOSS) and MS Commerce Server 07.
Kraft wanted the new platform to provide fast, easy publishing. In order give the sites clean brand awareness - reusable rich media web parts were developed that could be skinned to provide flexibility and uniquness across specific brand sites. The platform had to be scalable and bullet proof, Frank Perkins from the technical team was part of the team that helped make sure the infrastructure was rock solid.
Maria DeLuna, Technical Director at Razorfish (a Microsoft company), was responsible for leading the design effort. Key objectives were driven by the fact that each brand wanted flexibility ‘no strict templating‘. This is not an easy task considering the re-usability goal that was necessary to gain ROI. Out of the box skins & web parts were used to provide key internet marketing tools for polling, customer registration, product rating/reviews and newsletter functions. By doing this each brand’s marketing group attained feature rich integration with no backend development work needed, this speeds deployment by not having to wait for development to code standard functions. They achieved full creative layout control over were these webparts could be placed, this gave them more flexibility to what marketing does best, ‘create a vision’.
Web Parts Generate XML -> Apply XSLT -> Add Form Ctrls -> Render HTML
You can have one web part for navigation but present it differently on a brand’s site by using CSS. For instance one recipe webpart by all brands don’t look the same. Besides who wants to go to a Cool Whip recipe and have it presented the same way an A-1 Steak Sauce recipe is presented.
Kraft used a flexible template model that could incorporate standard content items but seperate them from presentation UI to let each brand have its own identity. This cuts way down on what I call excessive wheel building. Functional content items are bundled in a content group so they can be shared across sites and customized using CSS and XHTML to give them a unique look and feel. Gene Hong from Blackwell gave a technical overview of the web part properties and content publishing process.
Coca-Cola Enterprises has 75K employees, spread across 431 facilities worldwide. 23 – 30K of those employees are knowledge workers connected by PC’s, Laptops and Mobile computing devices. They have 4 distinct lines of drinks, Sparkling (coke), Energy (monster), Juice, Water (dasani) and Tea. Brett Kirkland (Priniciple Architect), Shahira Elsohy and Jonathan Phillips (Public Affairs) presented “The Sky’s the Limit – Journey to the Cloud”
CCE decided in 2008 to that it needed a 21st century communications platform. They wanted to consolidate the communications infrastructure to reduce the number of vendors providing those services, this drives ROI. They needed real world collaboration for employees, thus increasing the social networking culture between groups. The vision was to establish digital communications as the key enabler to engage employees to drive sustainably collaboration and ongoing innovation. Employees have good ideas and valuable knowledge, connecting them better would give CCE a competitive advantage.
In March of 2008 CCE announced that it had selected Microsoft for its integrated communication and collaboration platform using Online Services for SharePoint, Exchange and Office. By moving these technologies to the Cloud and taking advantage of a SaaS licensing model they gained ROI and efficiency by off loading support, ongoing hardware and software upgrades and daily maintenance.
- Key success factors included:
Active and Visible Executive Support – critical
- Market as an ongoing change management campaign well before launch
- Simplified Integration
- Created two-way communications
For a marketing video clip visit this link Coca Cola & Microsoft
Also this video from CCE Executives on the Decision to go with BPOS
Shadrach White
Chief Technology Officer
ImageSource, Inc.
