Infosec's Strategic Migration to Optimizely for Scalability, Compliance, and Future eCommerce Aspirations
Infosec
Madison, Wisconsin
Technology Training Company
Introduction
Infosec, a reputed educational entity, embarked on an ambitious journey to revolutionize its digital platform, ensuring robust performance, enhanced user experience, and compliance with global data protection standards. They sought the expertise of a dedicated systems integrator to facilitate this transformation.
The Challenge
While Infosec had an existing system in place, it ran on WordPress, which wasn’t fit for their growing enterprise needs. The challenges involved migrating page templates, ensuring a pixel-perfect transition, improving the ease of content authorship, and laying the foundation for possible eCommerce integration in the future.
The Journey:
Phase 1 - Infosec Integration: As the initial part of this multiphase project, Infosec, another integral facet of Cengage, was targeted for seamless integration.
Infosec: With aspirations to merge two different sites under the umbrella of Infosec (a sub-city area of Cengage focusing on IT and security careers), the integration process needed to be meticulous. One of the priorities was also to integrate with Optimizely, primarily for its out-of-the-box GDPR compliance capabilities. This was a strategic decision, keeping Cengage’s plans to expand significantly in the European market.
Migration Process: A mixed approach was taken for the migration, combining both automated imports and manual transfers. This dual method ensured no data loss and better quality assurance. The project's primary objective was to achieve a "pixel-perfect" migration, and any discrepancies encountered were addressed immediately.
Collaboration: Our team operated more as consultants rather than just implementers. We worked closely with Cengage's in-house developers. This collaboration was especially fruitful when integrating Infosec, where our team worked in tandem with their SEO provider, Pacific, to not only ensure uninterrupted SEO practices but also to bring about significant improvements.
GDPR Compliance: A significant reason for Infosec’s transition was the need for GDPR compliance, a vital component for their European expansion aspirations. Optimizely provided that compliance capability right out of the box, an advantage over their existing WordPress system.
Future Aspirations: Infosec, currently not equipped with eCommerce capabilities, looks to evolve into an eCommerce platform. The integration is seen as the first step towards aligning all of Cengage's entities onto a unified platform capable of handling eCommerce transactions in the future.
Supplementary Integrations: Along the integration journey, tools like their skills app, Tealium, and Tag Manager were integrated with Optimizely for more seamless data interchange and robust marketing strategies. These tools were pivotal in ensuring the smooth transmission of data between systems, with the Tag Manager playing a crucial role in front-end data integration.
The Results
Infosec's ambitious journey, from a non-enterprise WordPress platform to a robust, scalable, and compliant system with Optimizely, underscores the importance of strategic systems integration. The venture, marked by collaboration, precise execution, and forward-thinking, is a testament to the transformative power of technology when implemented the correct way.