Anyone growing up and going to school in Austria can't avoid the Austrian Schoolbook Publisher (ÖBV). Most students at compulsory schools use the textbooks and materials of this venerable publisher, originally founded by Maria Theresa and today part of Germany's Ernst Klett Verlag.
The first project phase aimed to completely relaunch the organically grown but ageing website and shop, responding to changing customer needs and technical requirements (responsive design, an intuitive CMS, new product groups and layouts, learning content, and more) while simplifying the system landscape.
For the go-live of the first stage, the ÖBV and Zensations project teams worked together for around seven months to deliver the corporate website, webshop and the connections to all the necessary interfaces (publishing system, ERP, CRM, DAM, SBX, printers, etc.). Frontend and backend were deliberately developed separately to maximise maintainability and system stability. On the frontend, the team took a living style guide approach, documenting every component technically (CSS, HTML, JS) so pages could simply be assembled from prototypes. This keeps the footprint small and boosts performance.
Drupal 7, an open-source CMS, was chosen as the backend for its scalability, excellent performance and very high security standards, an ideal base for a project of this scale. Seamlessly integrating a webshop via the Drupal Commerce module further optimised the customer journey for generating leads and conversions.
Working in an agile setup, features and milestones were prioritised in the backlog and, once built, went through automated and manual testing to ensure high code quality. Continuous integration, delivery and deployment workflows made changes to the codebase efficient, significantly speeding up development and shortening release cycles. For years, Zensations has relied on the renowned SaaS providers Acquia and Platform.sh here, depending on the client's needs. And once go-live went smoothly after almost a year of development, the team could focus straight on what mattered next: the following features.
A project of this size is never finished, it's an ongoing process of development and optimisation. The infrastructure has since grown with many more features, content types and connections to various external systems, including a landing page builder with different widgets based on Paragraphs that editors can now use in countless ways.
To best support the company's digitalisation strategy, we also built a connection to a licence management infrastructure from the German company Arvato (Bertelsmann) for digital products (SaaS). Through single sign-on, all digital products can now be reached conveniently and directly. We're already looking forward to many more exciting projects with the Austrian Schoolbook Publisher.
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