Yahoo! Sales Portal
“You and the team are fantastic… I spend every day involved in this, so you can imagine how passionate and happy we are with the progress. The site is really just beautiful… and it’s been a real education.”
— Valla Vakili, Director, Creative Studio
Client
Yahoo! Sales Team, the internal group responsible for the advertising and marketing activities for Yahoo!’s numerous and diverse web properties
Challenge
Sales team needs to organize document library and streamline document-sharing system
Yahoo! Sales Team realized that their internal data document application was slow and out-of-date. Adding new sales documents to this resource tool was a multi-step process involving emailing them to a fellow employee serving as a gatekeeper and then manually uploading. Such a cumbersome process meant that content often became stale and outdated; it was also difficult to add new users to the system to alleviate the gatekeeper’s upload tasks. Yahoo! Sales Team began working with Method to design and unify the production of their documents, create document templates, and present a unified face to clients. At the end of this process, Yahoo! Sales Team had a library of great-looking slides and presentation material—but a system that still couldn’t keep up with the company’s new goals of effective content distribution among their internal sales team.
Solution
Document library system enabling users to create, stash, and share custom sales materials
SolutionSet began by meeting with Yahoo!’s teams to discuss how to best share data internally. Establishing internal rapport was crucial, as some departments weren’t accustomed to sharing data. SolutionSet also worked closely with Yahoo!’s internal network team to set up a strict development environment limited to Yahoo!’s Oracle database, specially branded version of PHP, and firewalls. These plans in place, working from the designs and information architecture provided by Method, SolutionSet built a custom application framework, building such functionality as creating a unified admin system for uploading and posting documents (effectively eliminating the need for gatekeepers), full-text search, bookmarks, AJAX-powered dialog boxes for quick saves, RSS feeds, and pulling important data into a centralized homepage (effectively eliminating the need to log in at multiple resources). Yahoo! was so impressed with the effectiveness of this initial launch that they were inspired to work with SolutionSet to create further extensions, including automatically deleting old documents, email updates about document status, group document download into a zip file, a content management system, events calendar, and reporting tools, including records of most recent searches, most popular downloads, and other statistics. The final product: a robust document library management system that grows with the sales team who customizes it.
Technology Used
_xHTML/CSS
_PHP
_AJAX/JavaScript
_Oracle
_RSS feed integration
_ModRewrite for clean URL display