Customer Solution Case Study

Book Publisher Creates Dynamic Website for Better Customer Experience, Higher Profit

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Media and entertainment—Publishing and printing

Customer ProfileLerner Publishing Group is one of the nation’s largest independently owned children’s book publishers. The company is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has 200 employees.

Business SituationLerner Publishing Group wanted to provide customers with an engaging,e-commerce–enabled website. It also wanted to streamline site development and administration.

SolutionLerner Publishing Group used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to create a website with e-commerce functionality, social networking tools, and simplified web content management.

Benefits Improves customer experience Streamlines development and

updates Boosts competitive advantage

“All the capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 fuel our direct sales model and help us compete against other publishers and the big-name online retailers.”

Terri Reden, Vice President, Marketing and Digital Products, Lerner Publishing Group

Lerner Publishing Group, a leading children’s book publisher, wanted to take advantage of web-based digital marketing to create a more engaging experience for customers—primarily librarians and educators—who relied on printed catalogs and placed orders using the phone, fax, or mail. The company also wanted to increase the volume of its profitable direct-to-consumer sales channel. Lerner Publishing Group used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as the foundation for its new website, which includes e-commerce functionality and connects to line-of-business book title management and pricing systems. Early feedback has been positive, and the publisher expects the site to rapidly contribute to expanding direct-to-consumer sales, which it aims to increase by 10 percent. Because content owners are better enabled to manage content themselves, the company has also begun to reduce IT administration.

SituationLerner Publishing Group was founded in 1959 and has grown to become one of the nation’s largest independently owned children’s book publishers. The company has more than 3,500 nonfiction and fiction titles in print for K-12 students, which include illustrated informational books; science, social studies, and language-arts curriculum; high-interest topics such as sports, vehicles, and crafts; and picture books, chapter books, and intermediate and young-adult novels. The company is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has 200 employees.

Paper-Based Catalog Book SalesFor many years, Lerner Publishing relied on printed catalogs, and phone and fax ordering systems, to market and sell its books directly to school librarians and educators. Lerner Publishing Group publishes fiction and nonfiction under 11 imprints, each of which is targeted to a unique age and content focus. The company’s sales representatives work to reach as many schools and libraries as they can in their respective geographic regions, informing customers of newly published titles, and directing them to appropriate books and reading materials for each library and school’s classrooms. The company had a website, but customers could not purchase books from the site; it was purely informative in nature.

“We wanted to create a website that would allow us to engage more deeply with our customers,” explains Terri Reden, Vice President, Marketing and Digital Products at Lerner Publishing. The

company’s largest audience is school librarians and educators. It also markets to parents and booksellers. “Our goals were to make the site very intuitive for a user, and to provide value to our customers at each step of their process. Whether they are just evaluating books or purchasing, we wanted them to be able to connect with other customers, see titles that others were recommending, view shared book lists, and more.”

Also, without e-commerce capabilities, Lerner Publishing Group could not drive as many direct sales as it wanted. “Our profit margins are much better on direct-to-customer sales,” says Reden. The company’s competitors include other children’s educational publishers, as well as online retailing giants like Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. “We wanted to make it easier for customers to buy directly from us. Today, our direct sales channel comprises approximately one-fifth of sales. We want to reach one-third by 2012.”

Rapidly Changing IndustryIn 2009, in an effort to keep up with changes in the publishing industry, Lerner Publishing Group had begun to develop a strategy for marketing and selling digital books and other digital products. “Digital books are a growing part of our product mix,” says Reden. “To keep pace with market demand, we needed to implement a web platform that would support our digital initiatives well into the future.”

Inflexible Web Content Management

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“We wanted to create a website that would allow us to engage more deeply with our customers.”

Terri Reden, Vice President, Marketing and Digital Products, Lerner Publishing

From a marketing and IT administration perspective, Lerner Publishing Group needed a web environment that was less burdensome to update and cheaper to maintain. “It was difficult to update the website to push new promotions or to test packaging and merchandising,” says Reden. “Implementing new content and making changes required complex coding, so marketing always had to encumber the IT department to do this for us or outsource the code change. Enabling the marketing department to make quick content updates was a key factor in our decision to implement Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on the new site.”

The IT department was further burdened by the fact that Lerner Publishing Group was supporting two separate websites, one directed to school librarians and another one to teachers. Each site was maintained on a separate code base, which was based on Progress software and the WebSpeed development environment. The sites had subtle content differences, but shared a lot of the same features and functionality. “If we developed a new feature for one site, we had to almost completely redevelop for the second site,” says Tara Warren, Director of Information Technology at Lerner Publishing Group. “We were maintaining two separate code bases. The sites were very ‘brittle’—that is, very difficult to work with. Making changes to code required highly specialized development skills.”

SolutionIn 2009, Lerner Publishing Group decided to build a new website based on

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The company wanted to capitalize on its existing investment and expertise in SharePoint Products and Technologies (it relied on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for its company intranet), and it felt that it could use the newer version to transform its presence on the web. “We considered using Office SharePoint Server 2007 for the website,” says Warren, “but we felt that we could take advantage of the enhancements to social networking, search, and connections to back-end data systems in SharePoint Server 2010.”

In late 2009, Lerner Publishing Group worked with digital marketing agency space150, also based in Minneapolis, to design the creative and user experience, and with help from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Inetium, began development of the site. Inetium is based in Bloomington, Minnesota, and provides customers with strategic IT planning services, customer relationship management, business productivity, IT infrastructure, and creative services. “We selected Inetium as our development partner due to their demonstrated expertise with SharePoint Server and the Microsoft suite of business productivity solutions. Their proximity to Lerner Publishing Group was an added reassurance from an accessibility perspective, and we believed Inetium would be the ideal partner to deliver a best-of-breed website, leveraging all the best capabilities of the new SharePoint Server 2010 platform,” said Reden.

Platform for Data Integration

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Inetium used the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system to enhance and extend the SharePoint Server 2010 environment, integrating e-commerce functionality through Microsoft Commerce Server 2009, and connecting the site to data from the company’s line-of-business systems. These systems include an in-house book title management system called TurboWYNK, and the UNISON enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for publishing companies from GTS. These systems run on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software. “Through the custom programming that we did using Visual Studio 2010, we were able to integrate information from Lerner Publishing Group’s back-end systems and make them accessible and searchable in the SharePoint Server 2010 environment,” says Eric Raarup, Senior Vice President of Technology and Marketing at Inetium.

The website draws on information from the book title management and ERP systems to provide customers with details such as publication dates, author information, preorder and backorder details, and more. Lerner Publishing Group also takes advantage of these connections to present unique pricing to

each of the company’s five different customer segments. “SharePoint Server 2010 is a platform for data integration. We are able to poll TurboWYNK and UNISON, and populate the website and the Commerce Server database with information so that updated item availability and pricing information is always available to customers,” explains Neil Iversen, Lead Developer at Inetium.

Social Networking Tools Inetium also used configurable Web Parts so that Lerner Publishing could easily connect to third-party social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and its blogs. Through the personalization capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010, the site also provides a “My Book List” feature that, through drag-and-drop functionality, allows customers to build a personal list of preferred books and share this list with other librarians, educators, and parents through email or by posting to a Public Book Lists page on Lernerbooks.com (see Figure 1). “Shared book lists make it easy for librarians within a school district to share their lists with each other, or to send the list directly to the school principal for approval,” explains Reden. “We’ve included many tools within the site so users can share their knowledge and suggestions with each other.”

Web Content ManagementInetium used Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 to customize page templates that Lerner Publishing Group uses to create new or edit existing web content. Because corporate website design and style guidelines are built into these templates, the company can easily

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Figure 1. My Book List feature lets users drag books to a list, save it, share it, and refer to it later.

maintain a consistent look and branding across Lernerbooks.com. Site administrators can also easily modify functional elements of a page, such as navigational tabs to direct customers to “Coming Soon” books, books that have won awards, or are part of a new series. “We used SharePoint lists functionality to make it very easy for the Marketing department to update elements of a page without help from IT,” explains Iversen (see Figure 2).

Lerner Publishing Group also uses SharePoint Server 2010 to store and manage numerous digital assets for each book, such as front and back cover designs, interior page views, and a proprietary “font lens” that allows customers to view the actual size, spacing, and style of the print on the pages. “Each image asset is tagged with

an ISBN number so that when a customer clicks on a title to view, all of the image assets related to that title are dynamically located and made available on the web page,” says Iversen.

Dynamic SearchLerner Publishing Group prioritized top-notch search capabilities for customer self-service. Using SharePoint 2010 Search, Lerner Publishing Group can provide users with a quick search or a more advanced search that includes options for multi-faceted filtering of books by keyword; title; author/illustrator; age; interest level and reading level; copyright date; Dewey Decimal System classification; reviews and awards the book has received; state or national curriculum standards; and educational reading programs.

Building for the FutureThe new Lernerbooks.com website was launched in late June 2010. “This is just our first-phase deployment,” explains Warren. The company plans to add enhancements, including the sale and fulfillment of its digital products via the website, and the eventual transition of the company’s remaining satellite imprint sites. “In addition, we plan to use the SharePoint Server 2010 web platform to build an extranet that will help us collaborate more closely with our sales representatives. The extranet will provide these employees with access to sales reports, customer order status, marketing collateral, commissions information, and more.”

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BenefitsUsing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Lerner Publishing Group has modernized its marketing and sales processes, and created an intuitive, engaging customer experience that will help boost its volume of direct sales for higher profits. The new website is also much easier to manage and maintain than the previous one. Employees perform content updates as much as two-thirds faster than before.

Improves Customer ExperienceIn the first month after the new website, complete with online shopping, was launched, Lerner Publishing Group was already receiving highly positive feedback from sales representatives and their customers for the company’s digital marketing efforts. “Even though we are still adding functionality, our sales people and our customers are already pleased with changes to the site,” says Reden. With connections to the company’s book title management and ERP systems, Lerner Publishing Group can provide customers with personalized, up-to-date pricing information. Customers also can search books very flexibly in the new environment. The search interface provides filters that allow users to narrow their results in a number of categories. “Faceted searching is now the norm on the Internet. We want those who know which book they are looking for to be able to do a fast search and quickly find exactly what they are looking for. We also want to provide a more involved search experience,” explains Warren. “For instance, if a customer wants to find a book about elephants at the fourth grade level that meets Washington State

curriculum standards, they can find that easily.”

Social networking tools also improve the shopping experience for customers, introducing them to titles they might not otherwise discover. “Teachers and librarians are in touch with a large network of their colleagues. They want to be able to share information and ideas. With the SharePoint Server 2010 web platform, we can support them in that,” says Warren. “Our site needs to be able to show off our products extremely well, but it also needs to engage our customers in a way that encourages them to spread the word about our products. With SharePoint Server 2010, we can leverage our customers’ networks for better sales.”

Streamlines Development and UpdatesInetium used Visual Studio 2010 to develop the website and connect it with Lerner Publishing Group line-of-business systems. “We took advantage of the new tooling support around SharePoint Server 2010 in Visual Studio 2010. For instance, we are able to debug straight into SharePoint Server 2010 from Visual Studio, which saves lots of steps and development time,” says Iversen. “And, as a data integration platform, SharePoint Server 2010 is very efficient and easy to work with.” Inetium created a light, custom layer of code in Visual Studio 2010 that Lerner Publishing Group uses to poll its systems each evening and populate the website with current data. “SharePoint Server 2010 gives us a platform for developing mission-critical applications that help our

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Figure 2. Lernerbooks.com home page, with configurable navigation tabs and connections to social networking sites.

“As a data integration platform, SharePoint Server 2010 is very efficient and easy to work with.”

Neil Iversen, Lead Developer, Inetium

customers run their businesses.” Adds Iversen, “With SharePoint 2010 Search, we have created a robust, search-driven site that lets customers drill down very deep to select appropriate reading material. Without SharePoint Server 2010, we would have had to build this search functionality from scratch, and that would have been very costly and time-intensive.”

From a content management perspective, Lerner Publishing Group believes that it will save a lot of time updating the site and keeping content fresh. ”SharePoint Server 2010 provides an easy environment for content updates. Now, we can go to one location, and without having to get IT involved, make changes to the site very quickly. For instance, to change navigational tabs on a page, all a marketing user has to do is modify items in a SharePoint list,” says Ryan Bickett, Internet Marketing Manager at Lerner Publishing Group.

Warren agrees. “Recently, we added Fall 2010 book products to the website. This process used to take three to four full-time employees three weeks to complete. This year, with SharePoint Server 2010, those same employees did it in one-third that time. Now, we can add promotional packages and get new products on the site faster than ever.” Overall, Lerner Publishing Group will be able to shorten content update lifecycles “from weeks to days,” says Warren. “With SharePoint Server 2010, our ability to troubleshoot and react and get things fixed and deployed quickly has been greatly enhanced. We are able to do

mass updates and push new content to the website quickly. In general, we believe that not having to deal with time-intensive content updates will allow us to focus our IT resources on more strategic work, like enhancements or other IT company initiatives.”

Boosts Competitive AdvantageWith the new website, Lerner Publishing Group is transforming its image from a catalog-based marketer to an Internet-savvy book publisher. “We used to be very limited in our geographic reach,” says Reden. “Several times a year we could mail out catalogs, but on a regular basis, our sales representatives can only reach a limited number of schools and libraries. With our SharePoint Server 2010–based website, we will be able to expand our reach, generate more awareness for our products, and stay more closely in touch with our customers. The site is providing an experience that is significantly more rich and compelling than a catalog could ever provide.”

The richer website experience also will help to increase the volume of direct sales that Lerner Publishing Group is able to achieve, according to Reden. “The social networking tools, the e-commerce capabilities, the enhanced search—all the capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 fuel our direct sales model and help us compete against other publishers and the big-name online retailers. We are hopeful that the website will enable us to increase our direct sales by 10 percent over the next two years.” The new website also provides an environment for product growth. “With SharePoint Server

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2010, we have a web platform that will support our sales and marketing initiatives, including digital products, well into the future,” concludes Reden.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web.

For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, go to:www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Inetium products and services, call (952) 646-0800 or visit the website at: www.inetium.com

For more information about Lerner Publishing Group products and services, call (800) 328-4929 or visit the website at: www.lernerbooks.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published November 2010

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio−Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010−Microsoft SharePoint Designer

2010−Microsoft Commerce Server 2009−Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Enterprise Microsoft Visual Studio

−Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Partners Inetium space150