Traditionally, content management systems have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and taken months to implement. But a new breed of mid-market content management solutions, like Ingeniux CMS by Seattle-based Ingeniux Corporation, are breaking all of the rules and providing solutions more effective than traditional enterprise systems at a fraction of the cost and time to implement.

This was the case for Sound Transit, a leading regional transit authority that builds and operates rail, bus, and transportation improvement systems. With a large ridership and over $600 million in construction projects in 2006 alone, Sound Transit has critical communications needs that require rapid updates to its web site(s) and the ability to manage vast amounts of Web content, documents, and media.

Content management systems are used to empower non-technical business and marketing teams to author and publish Web content and to provide processes for managing the content lifecycle; including approval workflow, versioning, categorization, publishing, and archiving. The Ingeniux solution is based on next generation XML technology that makes information easier to reuse, update, and manage, dramatically lowering the cost and effort in managing large amounts of content.

Content management is business-critical application for Sound Transit. With its reliance on the Web to communicate with riders, the public and employees, Sound Transit needed a robust software solution that was still easy for non-technical content contributors to use. The old web system had lacked key functionality and was difficult for non-technical content authors to use, meaning most of the work in updating the Sound Transit Web site fell on a two-person web department.

Clearly, Sound Transit needed a new content management system to improve online communications and reduce the workload on staff. The rub was that Sound Transit only had six weeks to implement the new content management software. The old system was subscription-based and would expire at the end of July. The Agency required a solution that could quickly deliver a complex web site with over 140 different templates and migrate tens of thousands of pages of content from their legacy hosted content management system while meeting the deadline.

Ingeniux went to work in June. The new Sound Transit site would resemble the old site, but with a much better business process that would automatically update pages and reuse content. The Ingeniux team also added a more robust solution for managing news and RSS feeds. All of the external Web applications needed to be seamlessly integrated with the Ingeniux software. On July 25, six days ahead of the deadline, Sound Transit re-launched the SoundTransit.org website using Ingeniux Content Management System. The project was delivered on time and on-budget and has been a success.

“Ingeniux was given a nearly impossible task. SoundTransit.org has about 2,400 pages and about 11,000 linked documents. They ported all of this content with about 98 percent accuracy. I didn’t think it could be done, they did it,” said Jim McClendon, Sound Transit’s Web Developer.

One of the keys to Sound Transit's success was working with a local vendor. With Sound Transit and Ingeniux headquartered miles from each other, Ingeniux staff could easily meet onsite at Sound Transit, accelerating the implementation process and helping achieve milestones. Moving forward, Ingeniux will be in a better position to serve Sound Transit and provide additional support.

Buying from a local firm did not mean that Sound Transit had to compromise on quality. Ingeniux, a two-time SIIA CODiE Award finalist for “Best Content Management Solution,” was a proven company with hundreds of customers worldwide and is widely considered one of the top CMS solutions on the market.

Jim Edmunds, Ingeniux CEO and President said, “One of the benefits of being in the Puget Sound region is that local also means world-class. In the Seattle area we can draw on some of the best software development talent in the world. In this particular case we saw that on both sides of the relationship, and we we’re privileged to work with a progressive, smart IT group at Sound Transit that just, frankly, ‘got it.’ We look forward to building on our success and becoming a trusted partner at Sound Transit.”