Customer Solution Case Study
/ Real Estate Developer Builds a Better Website and Sees Return Traffic Triple
“We’re using SharePoint Server to make our lives easier, make the site more useful to our public, and drive our success. Everybody wins.”
Jeff Linton, Vice President, Corporate Communication, Forest City Enterprises
Forest City Enterprises, a major real estate developer, needed to update its aging website to support fresher content, a better experience for visitors, and fuller collaboration with vendors. To achieve all that, it built a website and extranet on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Now, time to upload content has been cut from days to minutes, a photo library speeds collabor-ation with media vendors, and return traffic is up by 200 percent.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published August 2010
Business Needs
The vast holdings of Forest City Enterprises stretch from the shimmering New York Times Building in New York City to the landmark Metro 417 in Los Angeles, with its Florentine palazzo–inspired architecture. They and notable properties throughout the country add up to more than U.S.$11 billion in commercial, residential, and land properties owned, developed, and/or managed by Forest City. What many of these properties share is a clean, fresh design combined with the latest in convenience and functionality.
What Forest City needed was a website that shared those qualities.
What Forest City had was a custom site with a content management system that was difficult and costly to update, as content changes often had to be outsourced to a vendor. The process could take a couple of days, which was too long for the release of news and other time-sensitive information. Some of the company’s business units had set up separate sites that were inconsistent with the corporate site’s visual and navigational design.
Key functionality was missing or insufficient, such as search. Users could only search part of the site. Hard-to-follow layouts made it difficult for them to find what they wanted through navigation. The company’s advertising agencies and other vendors were another underserved group; the website did not help them to acquire the media resources they needed, nor did it support collaboration.
Solution
Forest City turned to Blue Chip Consulting Group, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in web development, and to Dix & Eaton, a marketing and communications firm that had long worked on Forest City branding projects.
An early objective was to identify the web platform for the site. The company’s project lead—Jeff Linton, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Forest City—was open-minded about the technology choice. Then, he learned that the same technology behind the company’s intranet—Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007—could also serve as the web platform. “I wasn’t aware that SharePoint Server is used for Internet sites,” says Linton. “When I saw a public site that Blue Chip created with SharePoint Server, it opened my eyes. Our IT people liked the idea, because it was technology with which they were familiar.”
By using content authoring tools in Office SharePoint Server, business users can create and update content without the intervention of IT professionals. To help ensure that only authorized employees add or change content, Blue Chip used its BlueVault account manager to define user roles and access to the site; developers used Active Directory Domain Services in Windows Server 2008 R2 and security groups to assign employees to the roles and groups that would grant them appropriate access.
A design created by Dix & Eaton was implemented consistently throughout the site, and it remains consistent as users add or change content through master pages, page layouts, and cascading style sheets. To route content through approval processes prior to publication, Blue Chip configured a workflow in Office SharePoint Server that sped the delivery of updated content and ensured all content was approved before posting.
The site was given full, fast, relevant search capability via SharePoint Enterprise Search, which optimized the sharing of knowledge. The technology even searches the investor relations section of the site, despite its external hosting and management.
“All of this functionality was enabled by out of the box features in Office SharePoint Server,” says Trevor Norcross, Solution Architect at Blue Chip. “It cut development time in half, saving Forest City about six months.”
Benefits
The Forest City website, which is based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, now has an attractive, streamlined, and consistent design that is fast and easy for business users to update, and that better supports the company’s business needs.
Timely Content, Easy Navigation, Boost Return Traffic by 200 Percent
The posting process, which took a couple of days when outsourced, can be com-pleted within minutes by content owners themselves. So, the site now hosts news and announcements in a timely way. Forest City now also produces timely feature stor-ies that highlight topics including its new developments, green initiatives, and support for the communities in which it operates. Stories are changed every two to three weeks, so fresh content almost al-ways greets periodic visitors; previously, the extra time, effort, and budget to create and publish content meant such stories were changed only every six months.
Timely content, consistent navigation, and powerful search combine to make the site more useful to visitors—which in turn has tripled the rate of return traffic. Meanwhile, page views per visit and visit durations are down, consistent with more effective search and navigation.
Supports Move Toward E-Commerce
Many of the new visitors to the site are individuals looking to lease an apartment. They are supported by sophisticated search tools and interactive maps. “Individuals can now quickly identify the buildings that are right for them,” says Linton. “It’s not quite e-commerce, but it’s a clear step in that direction.”
Extranet Boosts Collaboration with Media Vendors
In addition to the Forest City public website, Blue Chip created an extranet site for a digital media library. The extranet supports video and photo libraries, and the ability to crop and resize images before downloading from the site, which Forest City shares with advertising and public relations agencies, members of the news media, and other vendors around the country. The extranet contributes to more successful marketing support for Forest City properties by giving agency partners broader—and speedier—access to visual resources from which to make selections.
“We’re using SharePoint Server to make our lives easier, make the site more useful to our public, and drive our success,” says Linton. “Everybody wins.”
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published August 2010