Chindex International, Inc.

The Problem
Chindex International Inc. had already invested in a professionally designed website but had no way to manage their content. They had devoted a large investment of time and money to an unfinished custom content management application that had become overly cumbersome and would likely be costly to maintain. Additionally, they needed to be able to manage and display content created in both Mandarin Chinese and English in order to cater to their constituents in the United States and in China. Furthermore, a laundry list of dynamic content requirements in the form of press release administration, real-time stock quotes, Flash graphical updates, and minor content updates had accumulated while waiting for the completion of their content management system.

The Solution
Lisa first spoke with Chindex staff to establish the requirements and divide the project into manageable phases to allow high priority needs to be completed first as well as enabling concurrent development. She then spoke with the previous developer who had begun the content management system to gain insight into the specific challenges encountered and to research the work to date. After a thorough analysis of the problem as well as a review of off-the-shelf content management systems, Lisa found that it would be much simpler and far less costly to retool the technical structure of the website to work with Adobe Contribute. This simplified the site code and, when combined with the power of Dreamweaver templates, allowed Chindex staff to make updates to their site pages in both English and Chinese without the possibility of jeopardizing the graphical look and feel of the site. Additionally, in choosing Adobe Contribute, Chindex was assured that the content management solution was simple, stable, and supported. The next phase of the project would allow users to view content in the language of their choice whenever available. Since the content management solution was already in place, only minor updates were needed to the technical structure of the site to preserve the user’s preference. The database was upgraded from Microsoft Access to Microsoft SQL Server to allow for full internationalization and storage of Chinese character data. ColdFusion MX, already in place with Chindex’s hosting contract, was used to handle the additional maintenance and content requirements, including utilization of web services to display real time stock quotes.

The final result
Chindex is now able to manage their own site content, both English and Mandarin, without technical assistance, and has the piece of mind of knowing that support is available both from private developers and from Adobe software.