Page 257 - DCOM507_STOCK_MARKET_OPERATIONS

Stock Market Operations

Notes A new, fresher look and feel
A full-site search function
Cleaner integrations with third-party content

Migration to a Manulife-standard web platform
Improved content management to give business users more control and allow for
more up-to-date content
Most importantly, the new site had to be up and running within 8 months, by June of the
following year, so that it could help JH Funds’ sales staff achieve their goals for that fiscal
year. Quality could not be compromised, but cost was flexible.

Nevo’s Solution
JH Funds had already selected a design agency for the project, Toronto-
basedTeehan+Lax (T+L). Nevo immediately set about working with its staff and with JH
Funds marketing to conduct full requirements gathering, teasing out the details that T+L’s
designs necessarily glossed over. In parallel, Nevo began building an implementation
team and performing design work, selecting technology platforms, laying out core
components like site authentication, and refining the content management system
integration strategy.
Based on its experience with ASP.NET 2.0’s beta version, Nevo recommended using the
newly-released development platform, while it suggested moving to SQL Server 2000, as
SQL Server 2005, while in full release, was not yet a Manulife standard. While JH Funds
was hesitant to continue using Teamsite as a CMS, together with Nevo it decided to hold
that component constant amid all the other change.
Nevo’s site component strategy was to use standard ASP.NET components wherever
possible, digging deep into the code to provide customization hooks where necessary.
Site authentication was a particularly thorny issue, as JH Funds wanted to unify
authentication and site navigation across three logical sites, one each for the public, JH
Funds partners, and JH Funds staff.

The original jhfunds.com stored many of its pages wholesale in a content management
system, depending on content authors to format it properly. The new system wherever
possible stored snippets of text in a database and formatted the text in code, removing
formatting responsibility from business users that lacked web page authoring expertise.
With an fairly open budget and a tight time constraint, Nevo avoided the common
consulting pitfall of overstaffing. Nevo staffed a team of 1 lead, 2 senior developers, and
2 junior developers, depending on JH Funds staff for database design and testing. We
believed that this staffing level was optimal, even ignoring cost; the coordination overhead
of additional developer would have actually slowed the work. To meet JH Funds’ tight
time constraints, Nevo recommended and won approval for deferring some pieces of
functionality to a second phase, including the integration of a site search engine.

Results
The redesigned site went live on schedule in June with the deferred functionality following
just a few months later, in October. T+L’s clean designs impressed everyone involved in
the project, and, with Nevo’s concerted effort to produce a site faithful to their vision,
jhfunds.com went on to win numerous awards, including an Outstanding Website award
from the Web Marketing Association and 5 different “best” awards from the Mutual Fund
Education Alliance. Nevo’s content management vision, while far less publicly visible,
Contd...

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