The challenge
It was a big one. The Army Recruiting Group wanted to redevelop their ArmyJobs website,
junking their old content management system, getting a new hosting provider, merging
existing sites, and adding new functions including an online application system.
This was a huge project. We embarked on it with a group of partners, knowing we
had a major task on our hands just managing something of this scale, let alone coming
up with a solution that worked beautifully.
One of our biggest challenges was the fact that the Recruitment Group had already
chosen Microsoft’s CMS. We’ve worked with MCMS before and we know it has certain
limitations which we would need to work around if we were to deliver all the functions
asked of us.
Another challenge was integrating a whole series of existing systems that would
need to work with the website.
Finally, this was a high profile site and the media attention would be intense.
Mistakes were not an option.
The solution
We decided early on that we needed someone who knew MCMS inside out if we were to
get the best out of the technology. We quickly managed to recruit and employ an
MCMS expert.
Our approach was to divide the site’s functions into chunks which we built and released
iteratively, allowing us to test the underlying structure as went along.
One of the first things we had to solve was who would carry out hosting. We’ve worked
with Rackspace Managed Hosting before, and together we produced a proposal that
beat off the opposition and was given the go-ahead.
Because of our MCMS expert, we knew that ‘out of the box’ the system wasn’t particularly
user friendly. We decided to use MCMS as the engine and combine it with tools such
as r.a.d. Controls Suite to give the site’s editors a rich interface to work with.
They began to prepare content for the site pre-launch.
We used an SQL Sever database to capture online applications. As some of the details
were highly sensitive, we introduced 128-bit SSL encryption to protect users’ privacy.
The result
The new ArmyJobs website was launched in late 2005. Since then there have been many
more enquiries than before, to the point where some kinds of enquiry have overwhelmed
the recruiting teams.
As early as April 2006 the site had received over 13 million page views and 1.5
million visits, 654,000 of which were unique visits.
There was a success on the hosting side as well. Because of the outstanding support
they’ve provided, Rackspace have been asked by the Army to provide all their hosting
services, which at the time of writing is a 35-server solution!