Case Studies

CMR Institute had a business designed around the delivery of educational content via books and CDs. In 2006, the company realized that it had to bring that business online to meet customer demand, deliver new offerings faster, and reduce costs. With assistance from Ironworks, CMR Institute implemented a new e learning solution based on Microsoft® software. The company’s move online enables customers to easily interact with learning materials, request new courses, track progress, and more. For CMR Institute, the move to an online solution is enhancing the company’s bottom line by enabling it to offer more courses, deliver new content faster, and reduce costs—all through a solution that is reliable and easy to manage.

Oxfam Great Britain is a leading international non-governmental organization(NGO) with a worldwide reputation for excellence in the delivery of aid and development work. It works with thousands of partner organizations around the world to help overcome poverty and suffering. To help strengthen its brand and realize new sources of charitable donations, Oxfam Great Britain wanted to expand its e-commerce capabilities. Oxfam Great Britain implemented Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 to build a scalable, retail portal at www.Oxfam.org.uk/shop.

The Dutch government’s Department of Road Transport (RDW) aims to bring seamless, electronic services to citizens and businesses and, in 2007, won the Computable Magazine Innovation Award. With the help of Microsoft Services, the RDW built an electronic services framework using Microsoft Commerce Server 2007. Using this, it developed e-services, which citizens and businesses can access through a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal. Available 24 hours a day, the portal includes an online application facility for replacement vehicle registration certificates. In just four months, 45 percent of applicants have started to use the e-service, which helps ensure new documents are issued to citizens in just 3 days instead of 15 days.

Miles Kimball Company offers cards, gifts, and household items through several mail-order and online catalogs. Some of the company’s Web sites are the result of mergers and acquisitions, and maintaining the sites’ multiple architectures became increasingly cumbersome and expensive. Also, as the sites grew more popular, downtime became a problem when the site infrastructure could not support the high traffic of the peak holiday season. To address these challenges, Miles Kimball Company redeployed its e-commerce Web sites using Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 Enterprise Edition. Now, the retailer has increased its order capacity, resulting in higher revenue, and has cut server hosting and managed service costs by U.S.$66,000 annually. Additionally, the company was able to use the experience of the redeployment project to launch a new brand Web site in just six weeks.

After launching an award-winning Arabic news portal, Web start-up Danat decided to launch a number of Web sites for Arabic language users. But it needed a reliable infrastructure to support multiple portals and reduce the need to rewrite codes. It also wanted to integrate business processes with the Web sites to automate sales transactions. After considering Web content management systems, such as Tridion, Danat implemented an infrastructure based on the Microsoft family of products which provide advanced user interface and integration features. As a result, its first Web site built on the new system achieved 10,000 visits per day and won advertising contracts from more than 60 top brands in the United Arab Emirates—within just three months of launch. Moreover, Danat predicts that it can reduce time to market for Web sites from months to weeks.