The agency chose CrownPeak's system over other hosted solutions because "we liked Advantage CMS's workflow and customizability. It was important for us to be able to create lots of different overlapping workgroups, and Advantage CMS had better reporting capabilities.

Case Study Summary
The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is America's chief trade negotiator and the principal trade policy advisor to the President. The USTR's website is the primary channel of communication between the agency and the general public, and requires a continuous shuffling of content to keep pace with the President's ambitious trade agenda.

In addition to adding and adjusting content, the USTR also needed to manage and maintain indexing and categorization for their large set of varied content types.  To make it easier to find related materials, the USTR required a system that would allow for content to live within multiple indexes on the site, so that users can browse a hierarchy of information as well as search within specific categories.  They needed a content management system that could also integrate seamlessly with site search, the email newsletter and user management system.  The USTR chose CrownPeak's Advantage CMS™ as a powerful and easy-to-use content management system that would enable the agency's web site to scale, yet be managed by a small team. 

Client
The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is America's chief trade negotiator and the principal trade policy advisor to the President.  In this role, the Office of the USTR is responsible for developing and implementing trade policies, which promote world growth, and creating new opportunities for American businesses, workers and agricultural producers.

Challenge
USTR had four distinct requirements of their content management solution.  The first was that the solution had to be easy to use - and easy to maintain.  The agency doesn't have the time or the resources to install, maintain and configure software to manage their web site.  There are many non-technical content contributors who need to be able to get in and out of the system very quickly. 

Second, the system needed to leverage the same content across multiple areas of the site for purposes of multiple categories and indexes.  Many people visiting the USTR's web site had trouble finding the documents for which they were looking.  While a search solution solved some of the problems, many times search results didn't highlight subtle differences between documents.  Often the version, date or title of the document wasn't available, making it difficult to distinguish between similar-seeming content.  Thus the content management solution needed to facilitate categorization of content, as well as enable the continued expansion of site structure as new categories and sub categories are added.  

The third challenge was to provide for a singular interface for the content authors to assemble and send email bulletins to the subscribers of USTR's outreach programs.  The system needed to provide for an efficient method for the agency to send email to their subscribers, and also update the web site at the same time.  The fourth, but certainly not least important challenge, was that the USTR needed to provide compliance with 508 accessibility standards.  The CMS needed to enforce compliance over time.

Solution
As part of its commitment to government, CrownPeak has developed specific features to ensure compliance with accessibility, workflow, and archival standards.  For example, based on USTR's site design, CrownPeak can guarantee continued compliance with Section 508 of the federal government's accessibility standard.  CrownPeak's versioning and content monitoring tools, combined with CrownPeak's industry-leading archival and backup procedures enable governmental organizations, including the USTR, to come instantly into compliance with data archive regulations.

Specific to the USTR project, CrownPeak is implementing a completely new navigation and indexing system for www.ustr.gov.   "Because the USTR has such a vast set of content, a key concern was ensuring that we could meet their extensibility and information architecture goals," said David A. Hudson, Director of Production at CrownPeak.  "By providing multiple methods to build content relationships, and then unifying them into a common structure, we could ensure that both the breadth and depth of the content could be properly realized.  Through this method, the USTR can also adjust the visual style of the indexes as well.  This means that a content-heavy site doesn't need to be devoid of design variation."
       
Finally CrownPeak's Advantage CMS™ provides an easy way for USTR employees to author content, upload assets and schedule both web site content and email content for publication. Through CrownPeak's partnership with EmailLabs of Redwood City, Calif., the AdvantageMail™ interface enables USTR to create, edit and move email bulletins through workflow.  AdvantageMail automatically creates the HTML version, the text version, and the AOL-Friendly version and pushes them out to the USTR subscriber list via EmailLabs.
 

Results
The entire system is being launched this summer through the www.ustr.gov site, so true ROI is still being measured.  However, prior to selecting CrownPeak's Advantage CMS, the USTR undertook an assessment of the return on investment.  It was determined that Advantage CMS™ would not only help create a more usable and friendly site for its constituency, but would pay for itself a remarkably short period of time.  The most important cost savers for the USTR included:

• Current costs in making changes to the web site
• Guaranteeing 508 accessibility compliance based on the USTR templates
• Much lower cost for future site re-designs 
• The turnkey implementation provided by CrownPeak minimized any strain on the USTR's e-government team - at much lower cost than alternative implementations
• Saving the cost of servers, licenses and maintenance of an internal system