Roland

Background.

Roland Corporation is a global-leading manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, including keyboards and synthesizers, guitar products, electronic percussion, digital recording equipment, amplifiers, and audio processing devices. With over 40 years of innovation that continues to shape the sound of modern music, Roland sets the standards in music technology for the world to follow. 

For many years Roland has been operating on an in-house CMS created by their engineering team. In 2015, Roland completed a global site redesign, however, the aging in-house system was becoming increasingly hard to extend for required functionality, and at the same time costs were on the rise for maintenance. Roland decided to explore CMS options that would allow it to create a consistent Branding & Experience among its 42 global sub-sites, and improve its global content maintenance by bringing all the different sites onto a single, convenient platform, both for content and infrastructure.

Goals.

Simplify the web structure, having all sites under a single domain, which use the same base infrastructure and can simplify the entire site processing 

• Improve content management efficiency, in order to rollout global content faster 
• Change should be transparent to customers (only the URL changed slightly) 
• Consistent design across all regions, in order to gain the global branding 
• Consider future various external system integration (CRM, ERP) during development

First, six sites deploy and, after successful release, start moving other countries’ sites over to Kentico, while gradually using other Kentico modules (Contact Management, Marketing Automation…etc.). 

Challenges.

Domain Integration 

• All the localized sub-sites should be under a single domain 
• Wanted to take advantage of Kentico’s localization features for pages that were common among all sites (products, banners) but wanted to be able to maintain completely different content tree structures between them (different content) 
• How to use the correct culture/localization with these sub-sites 

CDN workflow 

Roland wanted the images/media to be uploaded/updated on the CDN ONLY when the pages were published (in order to maintain consistency on look & feel). Kentico’s base media function could not handle such a thing. 

Cross-language workflow integration 

The previous workflow for banners and product pages management was done through excel spreadsheets and was very messy. Kentico provided a very easy interface to put everything in one area for management.

Solution.

By leveraging the built-in functionality and flexibility of the Kentico, together with cooperation in more technical aspects by Nextscape Corporation, Roland is empowered to meet all of its current objectives toward unifying their corporate web experience. Moreover, as an end-to-end solution, Kentico can provide future extensibility that can be used to provide robust marketing and sales insight. Current solution provisioning addresses the following challenges Roland faces: 

Domain Integration 

• Master contents, applicable to all countries is localized using Kentico’s system 

• Each country has a content display page that uses data-parts to get contents from the master and then uses in-page repeaters to display the localized version of the content 

• Using IIS’s rewrite functionality, on the server end the lang=xx-YY is automatically appended based on the first subdirectory in the URL (/jp/ or /us/ or /es/ etc.) 
• Allows for a single global product management flow, whereas each country can individually tailor their site content tree to better serve the region. 

• For example, one region may have no news section, or only one may implement a forum/community section 

CDN workflow 

When the content is published the event handler searches fields (that refers to the media library) and automatically upload relevant media library file to CDN. Also switches the published content file path to refer to the uploaded CDN file. This function supports not only to reduce DB lookup but also get the advantage on CDN to render content faster from each country region. 

Cross-language workflow integration 

With the combination of Content culture version and Workflow application, an efficient global content rollout workflow within the Kentico CMS was realized.