The Brookings Institution

Brookings.edu home page Brookings allows you to personalize your content. Easily email and print articles from the Brookings.edu site.

Overview

With an important redesign underway, the Brookings Institution and its Web communications partner, Threespot Media, reached out to Velir Studios to perform a rapid implementation of a Sitecore CMS for the redesigned Brookings.edu.

The project featured a thorny mix of specifications: complex content migration requirements; sophisticated taxonomy; site personalization; RSS, video, and audio; third-party application integration for robust site search with the Google Search Appliance; and email newsletters using Lyris Listmanager. But one of the biggest challenges was serving up related content. We had to make the system intelligent enough to sort through 10,000 articles, take a snapshot of each one, rank them, and present the most relevant articles to the user. And we had to architect this so it was an instant calculation.

Despite the hurdles, we delivered the solution in less than four months. With the new site in place, Brookings can focus on what matters most—their policy research—while the technology does the heavy lifting, serving the right content to the right users at the right time.

Project Heroes

“It’s an awesome experience working on such a renowned site. I heard an NPR interview with a Brookings Institution expert the other day and thought, ‘Wait a minute, I worked on that guy's page!’ There’s a real wow factor involved.”
— Daniel, Senior Developer

“Because of the time constraints, this was an intense project—we had to work hard and solve problems quickly. But everyone pulled together and rose to the occasion. It was great to be part of the team that made it happen.”
— Gabe, Web Developer

“Our collaboration with Threespot, Brookings’ design partner, was key to the success of this project. Working with them was a classic example of seamless interaction between the front and back end. It brought out the best on both sides.”
— Rusty, Developer

“We are really proud of this site. It’s a huge feat of engineering. We took the best practices on the Web and wove them into a single solution. It was amazing to watch it all come together.”
— Corey, Developer

Expertise

Technology

  • Sitecore CMS
  • .NET
  • SQL Server
  • C#
  • SQL
  • XML
  • XSLT