Cisco WebEx

Cisco WebEx is the worldwide market leader in the field of Online Meetings, web and video conferences. Roughly 28,000 clients use the services of WebEx up to 3.5 million times a month to share or transfer their presentations, applications, documents or entire Desktops over the Internet. WebEx maintains 13 Internet platforms in nine different languages throughout the world. Localizing these sites had previously proved both laborious and complex: the various content elements had to be hand coded into Dreamweaver; in other words, entered by hand into static web-pages. This was what finally brought the company to opt for an Enterprise Content Management System for the totality of their global operation, based on Open Source TYPO3. AOE media was entrusted with the conception and realization of the entire platform.

For the conversion to TYPO3, not only was an entirely new architecture created, but also for the first time, comprehensive localizing and fallback functionality for the complex administration of the WebEx portal. Via Localization Manager, the new system now enables a direct XML connection to the best known language tools, such as Trados, DéjaVu, "across" and others, as well as immediate contact with the participating translation agencies. Once imported, the finished translations can then be updated or fine-tuned within the TYPO3 workspace by WebEx editors. An integrated preview for the direct comparison of various language versions is also included on the site. Thus the time spent for each individual language localization process has been reduced from anything up to four weeks down to a mere 15 minutes!

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An unusual feature of this project were the so-called "language fallbacks", which present the site to a visitor in the nearest language, if the language of choice is not available. In addition, all the new WebEx portals have a very sophisticated design and a search engine optimized (SEO) navigation concept to help them be easily found and have the widest distribution on the net. For WebEx a new hosting concept was also developed: the various platforms were published as static sites and then distributed throughout the Akamai Streaming Network. Other particularly noteworthy functions are:

1. Editable Flash content: all text and images are entirely editable and localizable within the Flash Animation in TYPO3
2. Advanced Template Wizard – the TemplaVoilá Wizard provides the editors with a fast summary of the roughly 100 FCEs, Grids and Extensions
3. A/B Testing and Tracking – enables editors to test the effectivelness of different content versions. Every version is presented according to a defined Ratio, and its conversion rates documented.

The American, Australian, English, Canadian, Brazilian and Indian platforms have already gone live. The Chinese, Korean and other sites not yet online are currently in the localization phase and will follow shortly. According to WebEx, the Return of Investment (ROI) of the entire TYPO3 installation has rendered every previous experience made by Cisco in this area incomparable.