Health insurer MBF has completed a Web-based content management system (CMS) project and is working towards deploying a staff intranet before the end of the year.

Domenic Cuda, MBF e-business implementation manager, told Computerworld there was a need for a new system as the old CMS was at its end of life. "We assessed four major players in the CMS space -- Vignette, Documentum, Interwoven, and Stellent -- and could choose a new supplier or [upgrade] the old system, but the level of effort would have been the same," Cuda said.

MBF has a mixture of back-end mainframe applications, Tibco middleware, and now a Vignette CMS which replaced a five year-old Interwoven system for its external Web site.

"Interwoven was fairly proprietary whereas Vignette, based on J2EE, fitted well with our other systems," Cuda said, adding the infrastructure for the CMS consists of "expensive" Sun servers running the BEA WebLogic application server.

MBF"s Web content comprises some 2000 pages, most of which is the online magazine and membership information, but also includes news that changes regularly.

"With the old CMS, the document would go to an administrator, to IT services, through to testing and changes, and then be released to production," Cuda said. "Vignette allows us to publish and unpublish as needed and frees up IT"s time to do other things."

MBF"s diversifying business and new brand involved re-branding the Web site logos, colors and imagery which, Cuda said, took six weeks instead of five months.

He said the project cost A$800,000 (US$598,600), including the hardware, software, and services, and was completed in six months. Now MBF is focused on migrating its intranet, which was "just a basic IIS server", to Vignette before the end of the year, because the amount of content "has exploded".

"This is four times the size of the Internet [project] and involves a lot of content conversion," Cuda said. "Customer dissatisfaction has decreased immensely and there are now half the amount of discontented calls coming through the Web site."

The new CMS also allows MBF"s 300 business customers to access co-branded Web sites in "groups."

"Changes can be made to whole groups so what was [previously] two week"s effort can now be done in one day," Cuda said.

The CMS was mostly "out of the tin," but MBF, with its services partner AXE Group, changed the workflow to include double checking.

Vignette CEO Tom Hogan said the company has focused on providing a set of tools to solve content problems and bring down costs by consolidating sites.

"The advantage of a high-value intranet is that people have the information to do their jobs," Hogan said.