The world’s largest semiconductor company created Enterprise Content Management System for its developers community - Intel Software Network

The Client

Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor chipmaker headquartered in California, USA, develops technologies, products and takes initiatives to help people in making their life exciting and better. The company is world leader in making motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and ICs, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing.

Intel initiated a new online community program, called Intel Software Network (ISN), to better engage with software community. So, there was a need to implement an interactive platform where software community can easily access latest content, share knowledge and engage with peers and knowledge network for key learning.

The Challenge

Building a content management framework and associated components that will:

• Replace the existing ASP/SQL Server based CMS with the new LAMP stack based CMS.
• Existing CMS was a bunch of separate disconnected applications with independent data sources. Requirement was to create a Unified CMS which will manage all the different language sites, and have a unified data source.
• Implementation of features like Loyalty programs for User retention.
  

  Key Highlights:

  1. Building CMS framework from scratch

  2. Text, Graphics and video content management

  3. Forums and blogs framework creation

  4. Loosely-coupled components

  5. Akamai integration for Media content servicing

  6. Additional tools / libraries   1. FFMPEG for video conversion and optimization   2. Memcache for server side caching

• Audio/Video content management
• Categorization and Sub-categorization of video content.
• Video conversion from native format to Flash format (we used open source FFMPEG library for the same).
• Integration with 5 different social medial sites for automatic publishing videos to these sites and tracking viewership status through central administrator console.
• Migration of More than 20 GBs of Text and 100s of GB of Media content in 3 different languages (English, Chinese, and Russian) from SQL Server to MySQL. Existing data was in multiple disconnected data sources with different structure. We were required to create a unified data source and bring all the data together from disconnected to Unified data source.
• Work under limitation of not using any existing Open source application as part of solution architecture.

The Solution

We built the CMS framework from scratch for managing Text, Graphics and Video content in 3 different languages. The critical features included:

• Text, graphics and video content management
• Versioning of content
• Security audit trail of content
• Developed Forum and blog framework
• Facilitate community participation through Forums and Blogs, comments and feedback on the technical postings
• Integration with CDN service providers for rendering graphics and video content across the globe
• Meeting critical performance criteria through data and page level caching layer (Memcache)

Content Migration

OSSCube identified the most effective path for developing a new CMS that can be easily and effectively used by Intel Software Network community for knowledge sharing. We also accomplished existing Data Migration of > 10 GBs of text and 100s of GB of media content in 3 different languages (English, Russian, Chinese) from SQL server to MySQL. The other critical features we successfully implemented include:

• Integration with Other Intel Sites
• Separation of Theme from logic and Database
• Run time conversion of documents uploaded in MS-Word format into HTML, replacing the MS-Word styling with the Site Style sheets
• Ability to cater to 20 Million + user database
• Multilingual and Unicode Compliant

OSSCube implemented the CMS and forum with necessary features and flexibility that enabled the client to address the strategic needs of the ISN.

What were the key security and performance criteria?

The strict security specification for Intel Graphics required us to take strong security measures in the application Design and Implementation without compromising the performance. Some of the major challenges include:

1. 128 bit AES encryption for critical database content
2. Strong input filter implementation for prevention of various security attacks.
3. Less than a second page load time
4. Application architecture that supports 20 million users

The Result

• A unified content management framework for managing text/graphics and video content in three different languages.
• Loosely coupled yet integrated components like Forums and Blogs with single sign-on with CMS.
• Video Library with a common interface for Managing Video publishing to 5 different social media sites.
• Scalable architecture with session clustering and sharding provisioned at the architecture level.
• High performance application with average page load time for non-session pages under 1 sec. Accomplished through page caching in Memcache.
• Supports over 10 Million users
• Loyalty programs with provision of rewards to users based on their contribution to the site.