http://www.mindshareworld.

com/
Case Study

Prepared by:
Isotoma Ltd
Tower House
Fishergate
York
YO10 4UA

Contact:
Andy Theyers (andy.theyers@isotoma.com)
Mobile: 07725 269250
Office: 01904 567349
Background

MindShare is a global media network and as part of GroupM, is responsible for placing one third of all
advertising worldwide. MindShare’s aim is to make their clients' brands more famous and more profitable.
With nearly 6,000 people working in 67 countries and 97 cities, they have a significant presence in every
major market. MindShare is at the cutting edge of its industry and as such needs an online presence to
convey this.

Issues

MindShare wanted an innovative website that would demonstrate their strategic knowledge and
understanding of the digital media landscape, such as the web and how it can be used to deliver customer
success.
As a specialist in its field, MindShare creates a lot of information about and for their industry - white
papers, reports, case studies and opinion pieces - that shows their depth and breadth of knowledge.
MindShare prides itself on promoting current best of breed technologies and techniques to its clients and
so it was imperative that the new website reflected these values.
The networked nature of MindShare also means that they needed to convey their message from many
websites in multiple languages, whilst ensuring maximum reuse of content. This meant that a single,
language-aware, content management system was required, with the ability to serve multilingual content
across the full range of MindShare's websites.
Finally, because of the scale of content it was important to have a quick moving site, which visitors could
navigate quickly and easily. MindShare wanted something innovative to reflect their core ideals without
limiting accessibility, functionality and ease of navigation.

Solution

MindShare turned to Isotoma, one of the UK's leading Open Source specialists, for help. Having worked
with Isotoma on successful projects for their clients, Isotoma seemed the natural choice for their own
internal project.
MindShare required a Content Management System that would provide content flexibility and reuse, as
well as serving multiple sites in many languages. This led Isotoma to develop a content management
system based on the XML toolset (DBXML, XQuery and XSLT) that focused on the semi structured and
multilingual nature of the requirements. The recent rapid development of Open Source tools in the XML
space allowed Isotoma to feel confident in proposing a fully Open Source solution, rather than relying on
less flexible alternatives.

With traditional content management systems editors often spend hours preparing media assets such as
images and video for their sites. The Isotoma solution for MindShare included a media library and
transformation engine that automatically reformats media for the web, providing scaled and cropped
imagery and flash video as appropriate for all media; all done within the browser.

Incorporating an asset library that automatically converts videos and images into the right format and size
for the public site, as well as blog aggregators, complex workflow and authentication, support for multiple
languages and powerful in browser editing, the website enables Mindshare to demonstrate that they are
experts at what they do.

“The availability of robust, tried and tested Open Source tools has allowed us to build an amazingly rich
content management system with the features of the leading proprietary products, but without those cost
implications”, explains Andy Theyers, Isotoma Director.

Benefits

The resulting site is stylish, simple to use and effective, with feedback on the look and functionality of the
site being overwhelmingly positive. “Our network is one of our key strengths” says Thembi Morris-Hale,
Mindshare's Digital Marketing Co-ordinator, “and the website brings this across perfectly. It is also helping
both our clients and our own people do their jobs better”. There are great advantages for those company
employees responsible for local websites – a robust, intuitive and flexible content management system is
an invaluable productivity tool, making it simple, quick and straightforward to keep the website constantly
up to date. Thembi goes on to say, “the CMS includes a video converter and photo management tool
which makes my job easier and saves me so much time”.
Kirk McPherson, New Business Director, MindShare Worldwide summarizes, “Isotoma were a pleasure to
deal with, and above all, very reliable, which meant we could just leave them to get on with the job in
hand. The final MindShare site is exceptional - it delivers exactly the message we intended to both our
clients and our network of people across the world.”

Technologies used:

DBXML
lxml
Twisted
Xproc
Solr
ffmpeg