The Brief
Standard Life required a new development and hosting partner for their extranet for Independent Financial Advisers (IFAs), the ifazone. The ifazone is a key channel for Standard Life, providing information and services to 7000 registered users. Standard Life had to find a provider that would be able to port and re-organise the existing content from the current web site, to place it onto a viable Content Management System (CMS), and to provide an ongoing hosting capability for the ifazone. To do this it was important to understand the business processes and map these to the evolved solution.

The Solution
The project comprised design, application programming, setup and bespoke configuration of an industry standard CMS and secure dedicated hosting.

Scotland Online offered Standard Life the Interwoven TeamSite product, an industry standard content management system. Due to compliance issues it was essential that the CMS allowed for content approval prior to publication and site wide rollback and versioning.

Hosting for the ifazone was to be within the company’s “core competence” hosting facility in Glasgow on a five-tier resilient architecture

The development of the solution was to be run under Prince2 Project Methodology.

Scotland Online’s application development team created a series of template structures, using Interwoven’s data capture template and presentation template language. These allow authors within the CMS to create, edit and publish content.

Scotland Online additionally delivered the following requirements outwith the original scope of the project

• a disaster recovery facility was implemented at a second site,
• training was provided for users
• a secondary “Triple-A” accessible site was implemented in line with Standard Life’s commitment to the RNIB’s “See it Right” initiative
• detailed web site traffic reporting and web data mining functionality

While the extranet is focused on Independent Financial Advisers the design of the site had to reflect Standard Life’s group branding with individual sections for group companies. Scotland Online’s design team worked closely with Standard Life’s IFA-ecommerce and marketing teams to ensure that the key priorities of ease of navigation and use reflected the design aesthetic required.