So the chemical manufacturer added a content-management tool that uses templates for additions and changes to the site. "And it lets people contribute content who aren't necessarily HTML and ASP experts" because the navigation and HTML tags are wrapped around the templates, Holden says.
Eastman Chemical also was able to whittle down the databases on its site, which consists of both a public and an e-commerce section. That's because the content-management software, Eprise Corp.'s Participant Server, supports ASP pages within the templates. So Eastman Chemical's online product-catalog application on the public side shares database objects with the company's e-commerce applications on the extranet side. The IT team at Eastman Chemical integrated the database architecture by eliminating the HTML pages on the public Web site and converting the information to SQL, which is the e-commerce application's database architecture.
"We didn't want to duplicate the effort of any technical data on the e-commerce side of the site," Holden says. The product names, descriptions and technical data from the e-commerce application's database now are used by the public site for inquiries about products, he says.
Eastman Chemical initially had begun writing its own content-management tools but later abandoned the project for the off-the-shelf tool, which runs only on the public side of the site. "We are not in the software-development business," Holden says.
Still, not everything with content management is point and click: You have to write your own utilities with the tool to check for broken links, for instance, and there's no real way to manage these utilities for the software just yet, Holden says.
Configuring Participant Server requires knowledge of HTML and ASP, but Mike Behal, a systems associate for Eastman Chemical, says it's no more difficult than creating an HTML page. And unlike the old-fashioned HTML document method, you get to reuse templates. "You rarely start from scratch," Behal says. Before, any major changes to the site that affected, say, 200 pages would have required deploying or hiring more employees to manually input the changes. The templates eliminate that manual process.
Coming next to the public side of Eastman Chemical's Web site: technical help, a FAQ and some localized content, some of which will be configured with the content-management tool.
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