Toronto.com
Leading Online City Guide Finds Flexibility with Visual Studio 2005
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Company Overview
Toronto.com is Canada’s most comprehensive online city guide, attracting 690,000 unique visitors each month. Under the direction of Torstar Digital, the site now offers comprehensive and searchable business and event listings and articles to help residents and visitors alike enjoy the best of Toronto and the surrounding area.
Business Challenge
Torstar Digital is responsible for the technology that powers Toronto.com, TheStar.com - the Web site of the Toronto Star - as well as a number of Metroland regional community newspaper sites across Southern Ontario. Toronto.com was built in 1997, and the firm’s infrastructure was largely based on an early version of the CitySearch software system. Toronto.com is the only Torstar Digital site using this platform, making it impossible for administrators to share or reuse content from other Torstar Digital sites. Adding a new page or section, such as a special focus on a local event or news feature, required developers to build new pages and content frameworks from scratch. As a result, Toronto.com could not easily add special sections on a particular story or event.
Cost and productivity related to Web site maintenance was also becoming a concern. Torstar Digital sites are maintained by a team of Webmasters, with an additional IT team dedicated exclusively to the Toronto Star site. Adding new features to the sites, including Toronto.com, was often labour intensive, tying up expensive development resources and putting limitations on site improvements or additions needed to attract new visitors.
Earlier this year, Torstar Digital embarked on a strategy to help it maximize the reuse of content between sites and revamp the technology underlying its Web sites. It targeted Toronto.com as the first site to undergo a major revision. “We wanted to deliver all of these Web sites on one platform – one big content management melting pot, if you will – so for example, you could take Toronto Star movie reviews and have them pop up instantly on Toronto.com,” says Huw Morgan, CTO, Torstar Digital. “We could then take this Toronto.com model and apply it to some of our other regions, as we have Web sites across southern Ontario.”
The organization also wanted a platform that would enable content and graphic administrators to add to the site with minimal assistance from technical developers. “The crop of content management systems we have seen tend to be difficult things to customize, and need a lot of technical hand-holding,” says Morgan.
Torstar Digital considered several options from competing vendors, looking at both a front and back-end solution to help it better integrate its Web properties. After reviewing several bids, Torstar Digital opted for the help of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner imason inc., and implemented a solution based on ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio® 2005 development system and .NET Framework 2.0.
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Solution
Torstar Digital chose the Microsoft-based solution from imason because it shipped with comprehensive portal capabilities already built in.
“That was very compelling to us,” says Morgan. “I’ve had a lot of experience with portal tools from other vendors, and I really didn’t like the experience that much because they make you work in a way that puts a lot of constraints around what you can do. Listening to imason describe what was possible with Microsoft-based software, it was clear it had a lot of flexibility.”
Torstar Digital chose to implement a new platform for the Toronto.com presentation layer using Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0, built with Visual Studio 2005. This works in conjunction with an XML repository and Web services layer on the back end that is based on the Tamino XML Server from Software AG.
Several elements of the Microsoft-based platform proved particularly attractive to Toronto.com. One was the ability of Visual Studio 2005 to enable both technical developers and production and content supervisors alike to take advantage of the same tool, as all can work with ASP.NET 2.0 and other languages from within the same Visual Studio IDE. “Visual Studio 2005 features the ability to do a massive amount of customization to the user interface so it works optimally for users in different roles. We were able to use Visual Studio 2005 to help non-technical people simply add content to the site without having to build layout and authoring tools from scratch” says Scott Howlett, principal, imason inc. “This really kept the cost of our solution down.”
Developers at Torstar Digital were also impressed that ASP.NET 2.0 ships with new membership and personalization features, so that developers no longer had to create custom authentication code for areas of their Web properties that require user-sign in or custom code to allow users to personalize the site. “The executive team was really excited about these features, especially the personalization feature,” says Howlett. “We didn’t have to write anything for the demonstration that we showed them; the capability was already built into ASP.NET 2.0. Again, by leveraging the features of ASP.NET 2.0, we were able to keep costs down.”
“We also liked the Visual Studio and .NET solution because it gave us more freedom using cascading style sheets, so that you could have overlapping elements and have elements that grow and shrink on your page. This gave us much more artistic freedom to design the kind of professional-looking site we need for Toronto.com,” says Morgan.
Business Benefits
By taking advantage of ASP.NET 2.0 and .NET Framework 2.0 through Visual Studio 2005, Toronto.com is developing a site that will help Torstar Digital speed development time and make its developers more efficient and productive. Now that content on Toronto.com can be quickly reused within the Torstar family of Web properties, the company can begin using its developer resources to build more innovative and appealing site enhancements, drawing in more visitors. The cost of development will also reduce, as developers no longer spend hours building frameworks for each addition to the site.
Simplified and streamlined development process
Before implementing the Visual Studio 2005 platform, Torstar Digital developers spent large amounts of time building frameworks that allowed them to add new site content – content could not be reused in a fast and easy manner. Now developers can create Master Pages, which contain the manners and navigation aspects of the page in question and stores them for future use. Content administrators can then take over the rest of the page layout task by accessing Visual Studio 2005 and drag-and-drop content as needed.
“This will save us a lot of time, especially when we want to add a special section or feature. A content administrator can use a Master Page layout and develop a new skin for it, so it takes on the look and feel they need and gets it out in a manner of hours instead of a matter of days,” says Morgan.
Substantial cost savings
To help control the time and cost of keeping Toronto.com current, the company was engaged in an outsourced maintenance relationship. Given the developer efficiencies now being realized by using the Microsoft-based platform, the company plans to bring that workflow back in-house. “By recapturing that business, we’ll be able to save on the outsourcing fee,” says Morgan.
Also, by freeing up expensive development resources – as developers will no longer have to build pages from scratch when new material needs to be added – the team can focus more of their time on developing unique features for Toronto.com, and truly add business value to one of Canada’s premiere online city guides.
“I’d say the Microsoft-based solution will pay for itself in about 18 months. And that’s only if you look at the cost-savings versus capital outlay. It’s going to more than earn its keep by enabling us to boost revenue generation and synergies between properties,” says Morgan.
Standard, organization-wide platform
The new Toronto.com site is being re-launched in two phases – the first was done in October 2005, when the new Microsoft-based platform goes live. The second phase of the launch, which will include a new look and feel, is set to go live in January. Throughout the first half of 2006, Torstar Digital will also incorporate the new platform into its other newspaper properties, including TheStar.com.
“The major excitement here is that we finally have a system where the tools are drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG-type tools that allow us to work more effectively. We were frustrated by our previous content management capability, but we’re very excited by the prospects now open to us as a result of the Microsoft-based platform,” says Morgan.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
For more information on Visual Studio 2005, go to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/
Acquire Visual Studio: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com
For more information about imason inc. products and services, call (416) 597-3256 or visit the Web site at: http://www.imason.com
For more information about Toronto.com products and services, call (416) 596-4300 or visit the Web site at: http://www.toronto.com
