Implementation

Lay a Solid Foundation with Implementation Services

CrownPeak provides complete Implementation support services to take your company from concept to launch of a live website. Working at the highest levels of professional service, we serve as your strategic partner, leveraging our industry knowledge and expertise to implement fully functional, tested and approved web sites.

CrownPeak completes Implementation in four phases, from project kick-off and web content management system implementation and integrations to user-acceptance testing and content import and launch.

At a high level, implementation projects have four phases:

1. Solution Design: This phase marks the transition from Sales to Professional services. During this phase, CrownPeak Professional Services will collect requirements, plan implementation and kick off our engagement with you.
2. Implementation: During this phase, we'll be iteratively building and testing the web content management solution. Implementation includes not only the creation of the CMS, but, depending on the engagement, it could also include front-end development, custom back-end development, and third-party integrations.
3. Client Handover: We'll deliver your CrownPeak web content management system to you so you and your teams can begin learning the system, requesting adjustments to match your process, and migration of your content. At the end of this phase, your CMS will be is launched.
4. Transition to Support: This phase marks the transition from implementation to support. During this phase, you will complete content migration and launch the site from your CMS.  After launch, CrownPeak will continue to support you by updating the CMS at the your request..

After Implementation, we'll follow this process to successfully compete services projects you need during the support phase of your engagement. You can count on us to be your partner beyond implementation, ensuring your success with every site and online program you launch. 

Getting Started

To begin an implementation, we start with a solution design process that includes some essential phases and deliverables, shown below in order of importance.

Site Production

• For most engagements, we create the complete and tested HTML for the page types we will use to build the CMS templates. This represents a “slice” of your site. In other words, it should include all the page types, front and back-end functionality needed to support features in the site map and functional specification.
• If CrownPeak  has been engaged to complete front end development, this deliverable will be complete, approved PSD files for all page types.

Functional Requirements Document

This is the document of your business rules for content creation and site functionality. It may also include:

• Required third-party integrations
• Hosting requirements
• Server and operating system requirements for site and third-party applications

User Experience

• Document detailing the site’s user interface, information architecture, site navigation, and visual design. These documents generally include annotated wireframes based on the functional requirements for the site.

Site Diagram

• Flowchart of site structure.  It should be based on navigation and information architecture in the User Experience document.

Site Statistics

• This is required if you engage CrownPeak to host the site published by the CMS
• Information on existing site to determine type of hosting to recommend. It must include: traffic, number of pages, bandwidth and disk space requirements and security standards.

Strategy

• Document on the vision and purpose of the web site. A strategy document is usually designed to be read by non-technical stakeholders involved in web site planning.

Kickoff Meeting

Using the deliverables outlined above, our CrownPeak team will create questions, open issues, a schedule, and an agenda for the kickoff meeting to officially start the implementation. We’ll also create a skeleton of the Project Information Document containing the functional requirements for the web content management system integration. It solidifies the scope of the implementation and lists the details of:

• Scope: The specific CrownPeak products that will be implemented (Search, WCM, WCO) and any contracted requirements or limits to the implementation
• Site Map and Functionality: A flowchart of the site structure, navigation, and information architecture
• Web Content Management (WCM) Architecture: The architecture should enable all users to access their content and enable administrators to control access as needed.
• Communications: Defines contact and escalation during implementation
• Groups/Roles: Defines the types of users that are in your system (Authors, Editors, Administrators, etc.)
• Workflows and Approvals:  Defines the path your documents will take from creation to publishing on your live site.
• Users: With the Groups and Workflow defined, you can determine who the users of your CMS will be and what group(s) they will belong to.
• Hosting Information: If CrownPeak is providing hosting, this will be a review of the system requirements for the server and bandwidth
• Technical Information: Shows how the WCM will connect to your Live and Staging web servers (typically via FTP) so that content can be published.

In the kickoff meeting, the implementation team – which will include a lead (your main point of contact), web content management system (WCM) developers, and front-end developers and content migrators as needed – your stakeholders, and the director of professional services will complete the project information document to build the specification for the implementation.

Project Information Document

CrownPeak will deliver the Project Information Document to you at the end of the kickoff phase for your approval, along with a final project schedule. On approval, we’ll begin the web content management system implementation.

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Building the CMS

Building the CMS is an iterative process. In your weekly status meetings, your project lead will present the progress from the past week. We encourage you to give feedback in these meeting so that your changes can be incorporated into the next iteration.

CMS development includes:

• Developing templates
• Configuration of workflow, users, and groups
• Developing models
• Configuration of the publishing process

While we're building and configuring your CMS, you can be working on your content migration plan in preparation for the handover.

During CMS development, the site server is also being configured by our Hosted Systems group. The server is made available to the team during CMS development so publishing can be tested and configured.

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Integrations

In the kickoff process, integrations with other systems are specified for the implementation of your web CMS. Integrations can be simple as giving your team members:

• The ability to tag pages with a Javascript Analytics bug
• The ability to evolve toward building custom integrations with search systems
• Email blast tools
• Blogs
• Customer relationship management system (CRM) tools.
  

CrownPeak's Managed Services team has successfully built integrations with Thomson-Reuters, SalesForce, ExactTarget, DoubleClick, OpenX, Google Analytics, and more.

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Quality Assurance

During the Quality Assurance (QA) phase, the Managed Services team reviews the web CMS and integrations to validate that all the requirements in your Project Information Document are included in the content management system for delivery.

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Delivery and UAT

Once delivery of the CMS, integrations and QA are completed, the lead will schedule a User Acceptance meeting to deliver the CMS and begin the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase of the project. During UAT, you can expect to spend one to two weeks of active testing in the CMS. Our CrownPeak team will quickly address requested changes and bugs so testing can progress smoothly.

The purpose of UAT is to validate the CMS. During UAT, it's best for you to enter as much content as necessary in order to:

• Validate each page type
• Validate the user, group and workflow configurations
• Validate the models to be sure that team members are able to create the correct page types in the correct areas of the site
• Publish content to the live and stage sites.

By the end of the meeting, we expect the power users to be able to:

• Train your end users
• Log into the CMS
• Enter content
• Validate the implementation.

The meeting agenda includes:

• Access information for the CMS
• Overview of the CMS framework and user interface
• Overview of the CMS organization
• Detailed training on each template, including the available fields, how the content entered is shared, where each template is available
• Instructions on workflow and publishing
• Instructions on reporting bugs or requesting changes.

The UAT meeting will be held at your site. The CMS lead will be on site for the meeting and the following day to review all your client deliverables, answer questions as content entry begins, and to make quick changes or address issues.

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Launch and Support

At this point, your CMS and integrations will have been implemented as designed, the CMS will have been been delivered, and you will have validated the implementation during User Acceptance Testing. Our final step together is to transition to support for the site launch.

To transition, the lead meets with the Support team. With the same UAT agenda, the lead will train Support on the details of the implementation.

Next, the lead will send you a support document with details on the support hours you have purchased, troubleshooting tips, and how to contact support.  

At this point, the site that is being managed by the CMS is probably not live and available to the public. You can now execute your content migration plan and enter the remaining content so the site can be completed for launch.

If you require additional changes and fixes, you can contact the support team at support@crownpeak.com with requests.

Support will guide you through best practices for publishing the site to your staging location, publishing to the live location, and making the site available to the public.

After launch, some changes are always needed. These could be due to changes in your organization, changes in the site, changes in the process for managing the CMS, and so on. You will have chosen a number of Service hours each month to request these changes. If the change is large enough, it will trigger the same process of design, implementation, QA, UAT, and launch as was completed for implementation.

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