Case Study

Web Application Management Services Help an Integrated Media Company Enhance Its Online Presence

Customer: ALM Media Properties, LLC Profile: A global leader in specialized business news and information serving the legal, real estate, consulting, insurance, and investment advisory industries.

Services: Application Management
Size: 501-1,000 employees
Region: New York, USA
Industry: Media and Marketing

Business Need

ALM is an information and intelligence company that provides customers with critical news, data, analysis, marketing solutions, and events to manage businesses successfully. Through its various websites, ALM offers legal professionals with practice information, classified advertising, and legal education.

ALM required web development, enhancement, support, and maintenance services for its mission-critical websites, which would help synchronize business operations, reduce complexity, improve performance, and ultimately sail smoothly through challenging and constantly evolving technological changes.

Their requirements included:

a) Development of a lead prospecting tool with advanced filtering and analytical capabilities to easily find prospects

b) Website maintenance services, along with implementation of new modules and fast search capabilities

c) Development of a market directory application (a digital resource to allow ALM search through the industry’s most comprehensive product and service guide)

Solution and Approach

To help ALM effectively manage and enhance its website portfolio and support individual business needs, Synoptek (formerly Indusa) provided web development, enhancement, support, and maintenance services.

  • Development of a lead prospecting tool with advanced filtering and analytical capabilities to easily find the prospects

An intuitive and comprehensive online sales prospecting and plan analysis tool was developed that enables agents to find qualified leads, and identify opportunities.

The tool consists of:

  • Dashboard – provides the overall summary of the application i.e. recommended plans, database overview, watched plans, recently viewed plans, and help center
  • Plan Details – allows agents to find all the information of a particular plan like plan summary, plan participant, plan provider, plan financial information
  • Advanced Search – is a robust search interface that has extensive search features like faceting, advanced search filtering on various attributes, and enables agents to quickly perform searches
  • Search Center – provides the most recommended searches for any user
  • Exports – allows the result returned from Advanced Search or Search Center to be exported with pre-defined and custom layouts

The application was integrated with Apache SOLR search server for fast searching.

  • Website maintenance services, and implementation of new modules and fast search functionality
  • The website was made responsive with mobile, tablet and iOS 5, 6, 7 compatibility through a responsive Drupal 6 theme.
  • The newly integrated Elasticsearch (Sphinx search was removed from the front end and back end panel) replaced the existing search functionality.
  • Elasticsearch was implemented with the highlighted fragment features (due to this feature, the search result-list comes out with summary (with terms highlighted if present) and the content is extracted with highlighted terms.)

A custom module was developed to track member’s daily activity and manage member’s subscription.

Another custom module manages information including daily updates, analysis, and commentary on the most significant insurance coverage law decisions from courts across the country.

  • Development of a market directory application

A market directory application was developed, for users to create contacts, renew listings, manage their listing plans (that include normal listings and paid listings), create free listing and enhanced listing based on their requirements, handle CMS pages, payment and activity analysis, and perform advanced search (term wise or category wise or location wise).

Business Results

Synoptek’s end-to-end application management services – web development, enhancement, support, and maintenance, ensures that all facets of ALM’s online presence are taken care of, in order to gain maximum benefit from its website portfolio.

ALM experiences the following benefits:

a) Development of a lead prospecting tool

  • Intuitive search tools to target and prioritize leads, with focus on the right leads
  • Export and share filtered plans with pre-defined, custom layouts
  • Detailed analysis of a plan by providing different indicators like plan score card and red flags. These indicators summarize a plan’s value as a prospect, thereby help to measure the performance of a plan with decision making.
  • Quick search facilitated with the use of Apache SOLR search server
  • Scalable UI

b) Website maintenance services with implementation of new modules and fast search functionality

  • Quick search ability for end users
  • Analysis and reports regarding website and articles
  • Daily activity tracking
  • Member subscription management
  • Separate Elasticsearch tool for observation and analysis

c) Development of a market directory application

  • End users can easily add, update, and delete their listing
  • Track documents
  • Fast search functionality
  • Easily maintain CMS pages and data by admin panel
  • Track payment transactions
  • Document cloning functionality
  • Newsletter and email configurations
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