The Challenge

The Operations Center of a federal agency is responsible for monitoring disasters, emergencies, and incidents and then publishing timely reports to key stakeholders, including senior leadership, faster than they would receive information from news outlets. This highly time-sensitive and mission-critical process was being performed by drafting content in OneNote and copy-pasting that content into Outlook for publication, a time-consuming and error-prone process. Distribution was managed within Outlook and formatting needed to be manually set for every piece of content. This process was unsustainable for the office in the long term as products only existed in users’ inboxes, and authors had to copy and paste content between different systems. The office required a content management system in which they could quickly and collaboratively edit content, much like Google Docs, and then publish to multiple channels (email, PDF, and the web) from the same interface. This system also needed to handle information designated as sensitive but unclassified (SBU), adding an additional layer of security and process-related requirements. 

The Solution

EK architected and built a collaborative authoring and multi-channel publishing content management system for the Operations Center. EK developers used ProseMirror, a collaborative text editing component, to create a custom text editor for Operations content. This editor includes pre-set templates depending on which content type is being drafted so that users do not have to spend time manually formatting their content. Additionally, the editor UI flags any content entry errors the user may have made so that the finished product is published without issues. Once users have completed their drafting process, they can publish their content as an email, PDF, and web page all in one click. To expedite the time to publish, the system also auto-classifies the document based upon the strictest classification of any single content component.

In order to facilitate the publication process, the CMS employs a set of microservices that render and assemble the content into its different formats. Content is stored in the backend as JSON files so that each component can be parsed and rebuilt correctly for each channel.

The EK Difference

EK was able to leverage the wide-ranging expertise of its staff to support this CMS implementation project. EK partnered with the operations office for a 3-year engagement that spanned the initial discovery and visioning phases of the product all the way through to developing the CMS into its maturity. EK employs experts in CMS architecture, development, content strategy, and product management who all collaborated on creating the best possible product for the operations center. EK staffed full-time resources on this project, eliminating the need to bring in subcontractors or outsourced resources. 

As experts in knowledge management and content management, EK delivered features and functionality beyond that of a typical CMS implementation. The CMS EK architected employs a componentized content strategy that stores and tags content as building blocks instead of whole documents. EK also designed custom taxonomies that reflect the way users think about and interact with content. Both of these advanced content services underpin functionality in the CMS, like customer self-subscription, which allows users to decide which published products are delivered to their email inbox, faceted search, and content reuse.