William Reed Business Media has been providing market leading business information for 150 years. The markets we serve are central to everyone's life. They include food and drink, where our activities extend across manufacturing, retail, wholesale and hospitality, and, more recently, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

in 2011 William Reed Business Media, one of the UK's longest standing B2B publishers migrated www.morningadvertiser.co.uk and www.mobile.morningadvertiser.co.uk to eZ Publish 4.6 from a proprietary Microsoft based platform with assistance from eZ Platinum Partner, Kaliop Interactive Media (www.kaliop.com).

The migration was followed by a larger project in 2012 to upgrade or migrate 20 sites onto eZ Publish 4.6 with a full service level support with an Enterprise Gold subscription and to transfer hosting and support to Kaliop.

The publisher recognises that their audience chooses the channel and device of reading so to ensure maximum audience reach an in-print, PC and mobile edition is vital to cover all consumers' information needs.

William Reed's Montpellier, France, division formerly Decision News Media, had already been running on eZ Publish version 4.2 since 2007. A technology review by Mr Jim Bridge, CTO, concluded that an upgrade was required to improve functionality, stability and sustainability for the next generation of their business.

Kaliop and William Reed completed the upgrade and migration in just 10 weeks at the start of 2012.

As part of the upgrade a bespoke workflow systems has been designed for the back office to facilitate the editorial management of 20 different brands, teams and domains.

Several of William Reed's sites serve a global audience so to ensure rapid delivery of their content they have installed eZ Accelerator using Varnish Cache technology.

Global traffic levels across the installed sites is approximately 1 million unique browsers per month with 3 million page impressions. Traffic is seen to be growing since the upgrade went live, in part due to improved search on eZ Find (based on Apache Solr) and more rapid content delivery.

Mobile strategy is key to the company's audience growth. They note that their mobile traffic has increased 165% year on year and is projected to continue at a strong pace in 2012. All 20 sites on the eZ platform have both PC and Mobile editions so that the user experience is optimized for large and small screens. eZ Publish recognizes the operating system of the browser calling the pages and automatically serves the appropriate PC or Mobile edition.

As an integrated B2B communication platform William Reed's multiple sites are just one channel along with a healthy registered user email newsletter and lead generation service. To facilitate this model the eZ installation includes an integration with their 3rd party CRM and emailing suite, Neolane.

From a business revenue model the websites benefit from a mixture of CPM and tenancy based advertising. For the tenancy-based advertising their clients purchase time and location ad spots as sponsors of channels. For Business-to-Business marketers the direct relationship with the publisher and an understanding of the site's importance as an information hub within their business community this model is often found to be mutually satisfactory and simple for all parties.

William Reed Business Media acquired Decision News Media based in Montpellier in 2009. The acquisition has helped one of the UK's longest standing publishers embrace and experience the "digital first" business model of a pure play digital publisher.

The upgrade to eZ 4.6 is just one part of an overall strategic technology review for the whole of the group. 2012 and beyond will see further back-office IT developments designed to ensure improved integrations and efficiencies.

IT in publishing means constant development. In terms of moving to a Digital First strategy in content management and distribution you just have to make the decision to start.

Jim Bridge, CTO, is philosophical when asked how he viewed his company's transition from a traditional publishing group to a Digital First business: "Transition supposes that there is an end game, there is no end game. IT in publishing means constant development. In terms of moving to a Digital First strategy in content management and distribution you just have to make the decision to start".

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About William Reed Business Media

William Reed Business Media has been providing market leading business information for 150 years. The markets we serve are central to everyone's life. They include food and drink, where our activities extend across manufacturing, retail, wholesale and hospitality, and, more recently, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

About Kaliop Interactive Media

Kaliop is a certified Ibexa Platinum Partner with references of over 100 web projects developed using Ibexa DXP. 
At Kaliop, our area of expertise lies in DXP technology with a particular focus on Ibexa DXP.

We develop web site generators, multi-functional portals, intranets, extranets, custom web applications as well as web applications for PDAs, smartphones or other portable device.