congstar (Deutsche Telekom)

True to its motto – "You want it, you get it" - AOE media provided congstar with a new web architecture using TYPO3. The installation of this new, free of charge license, Content Management System is going to make the young Telco provider (a subsidiary of the German Telekom AG) even faster and more flexible than before in responding to customer requirements and changing market trends. The most important challenge for this project: making a seamless connection with congstar's shop system "Orbiz digitrade". And another thing the congstar project shows once again is the way that TYPO3 Enterprise CMS seamlessly integrates with, or docks into, other software products.

Since July 2007, congstar has offered its customers cheap broadband Internet access, Internet telephone and cell phone services. The focal point of congstar's offer is that all their products can be picked and mixed at will. This means that congstar can offer customers an ADSL and cell-phone service tailored exactly to their lifestyle.

This explains the key role played within congstar's business model by their shop system: potential customers need to find, choose, combine and order such pick'n'mix products easily and quickly from within the entire integrated product catalogue. Difficult to reproduce or replace due to its complexity, congstar decided for the present to keep the system they trusted and were familiar with for everything pertaining directly to marketing. However, they wanted their Marketing and Sales staffers to be able to make and publish their own content and layout changes with the least possible time loss. Thus a combination of the best of both worlds was arrived at for the new congstar web architecture. Other than what one might suppose, the original shop system was not integrated into the TYPO3 CMS, but rather the reverse: TYPO3 became an integral component of the product and customer data storage facilities within the current shop system. Consequently, from now on it was decided to deliver all content heavy pages and the complete optimized landing pages directly from the TYPO3 CMS, instead as was previously the case, from the shop system.

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To this end various extensions were newly programmed, the templating concept implemented, about a hundred web pages migrated into the CMS and the TYPO3 CMS custom-adapted for these particular requirements. Thanks to the new, highly flexible templating concept, the congstar editors can now react far faster to market developments and initiate changes in content and layout to meet the altered situation. To give an example, a special module was developed to enable the congstar editors to link to the shop pages directly from the TYPO3 Backend or even go straight to the shopping cart. In addition, the central editing of footnotes was also realized by writing a special extension. Furthermore, a connection to diverse page-rating and other analytical tools was created to assist the sales department, as well as marketing and promotion people, to react smoothly and in a precisely targeted manner to any changes in demand. One particularly practical function was the new “recharge finder”, which helps congstar’s new pre-paid service customers find the nearest recharging partner in their home-town, quickly and easily. Through a connection to Google Maps the customer can immediately get a visual fix on their search object. This means that the appropriate recharging station can be shown exactly, merely by entering a postcode. The geo-data delivered initially by Google Maps is temporarily stored on the TYPO3 server, so that the question itself does not have to be fielded at all by Google, but is answered by the server cache. This results in a massive performance boost for the function. However, such a feature meant that developing and installing a high performance caching and hosting concept was one of the projects additional challenges. With visitor statistics in double-digit millions (Unique Visitors per month) a solution was required that could be limitlessly up-scaled. The technically sophisticated solution from AOE media unreservedly delivers to match demand.