Hanson Dodge Rocked My World

.NET CMS implementation varies in its complexity. Some projects are pretty basic – maybe a unique look and feel to the site, but otherwise straight-up content management. Other implementations provide interesting challenges that can push the limits of many lesser CMS systems. Hanson Dodge’s Outstanding Solution falls into this latter category. Their slogan is “Active minds at work,” and, from what I saw in their Outstanding Solution application, this is an understatement.

The focus of this Outstanding Solution was a web site for a world leader in Sports Utility Transportation (see Sitecore Recognizes Outstanding CMS Projects for more information). Hanson Dodge did more cool stuff than I could possibly mention in a single blog post, so I’ll focus on two areas in particular: internationalization and application integration.

Let’s start with internationalization. As you may know, Sitecore starts off with multilingual capabilities, but a skilled partner can take the platform much, much further. Hanson Dodge was tasked with numerous internationalization requirements:

• Over 30 different languages for the site
• Independent language and country dimensions (i.e. think of a country as a market whose content can be viewed in any number of languages)
• Different product lines and site content by country
• Configurable fallback languages (i.e. if the content isn’t translated into language A, revert to language B)
• Country-driven pricing
• Multi-lingual Flash content

To deal with these requirements, Hanson Dodge used Sitecore’s extensible framework impressively. From extending Sitecore’s dictionary functionality to adding a custom language fallback feature to filtering market-specific content, Hanson Dodge repeatedly showed themselves to be .NET and Sitecore pros.

In terms of application integration, Hanson Dodge had a significant list of systems that needed to talk to each other:

• Coveo Enterprise Search
• Stibo STEP Product Information Management
• SpatialPoint Dealer Locator
• IP2Location GeoIP Lookup
• Shopatron E-commerce
• WebORB for .NET (for Adobe Flex integration)

Sound like a handful? The integrations were numerous and Hanson Dodge was able to leverage Sitecore’s extremely open architecture to plug in to system functionality as required. Particularly interesting was their use of Sitecore’s Data Provider abstraction layer to pull in content from the Stibo STEP system. This allowed them to integrate the STEP content in the authoring environment while publishing standard Sitecore items to the delivery environment (and thus shielding the STEP system from web site traffic).

I could go on about Hanson Dodge and their expertise with Sitecore, but I encourage you to talk to them directly about their projects. If you are considering a site with an international audience or where system integration is crucial, this Sitecore partner has the experience and expertise you need.