BMCtv

Site	BMCtv
Industry	Information Technology
Location	United States
Provided by	Quintagroup
Contact	Quintagroup

BMCtv Plone-powered website was developed for BMC Software, Inc. focusing on corporate videos. BMCtv brings the world of IT. This is a place where a visitor can view interact videos from BMC Software, Partners and customers.

BMC Software, Inc., is a leading American enterprise management software provider, focusing on IT infrastructure applications. BMC was founded in 1980 and is headquartered in Houston, Texas. BMC provides IT with the Business Service Management solutions it needs to drive business value through better management of technology. There are data recovery, systems management, customer relationship management, service level management, storage management, infrastructure management among products BMC provides.

BMCtv - focuses on corporate videos. BMCtv brings the world of IT. This is a place where a visitor can view interact videos from BMC Software, Partners and customers. Videos are specifically segmented for IT Professionals, CIOs, CMDB and ITIL, Business Service Management, Partner Success, Customer Success, BMC Userworld, Education and Speeches and Events.

Overview

BMC Software, Inc. has already experienced the advantages of Plone as a perfect base for another company website talkBMC, that is a storage of blogs and podcasts on IT from a business perspective.

Business Need

This time BMC Software addressed Quintagroup with the request to provide their online video project with the appropriate solution to support all aspects of online video management.

• The bulk of the video content items was intended to be created on the website, so there was a need to have a possibility to manage them without unnecessary effort.
• Only the content from blip.tv was planned to be used (blip.tv was selected as a nice platform for uploading high-quality videos). All of those videos are supposed to be re-encoded specifically for BMCtv.
• Get videos loaded as quickly as possible. 
• Channels can be structured by thematic subchannels, aimed to make video categorization more precise. (For example: channel 'Speeches and Events' has a subchannel 'The State of BSM'). Subchannels might expand over time.
• After videos are inserted, it is necessary to tag them, and refine the process of showing them up properly in channels.
• Possibility of easy occasional edit: add and prune the list of tags.

Solution

The solution is based on a CMS, powered by Zope and Plone, plus blip.tv platform. Plone was  chosen as an ideal platform because of the system's ease-of-use, rich feature set, strong open source development community, outstanding customizability, high performance and perfect reputation. TalkBMC Plone-base website performance success was undoubtedly taken into account as well. blip.tv was selected for its effective video storage facilities and fine high-quality videos performance.

Thus, Plone with its ease of content management and blip.tv with its efficient video storage facilities served as an ideal combination for achieving the best video management results.

Benefits

• BMC videos visibility with search engines increased after implementation of Plone CMS. This will help to drive BMC content on ITIL, BSM, related products and solutions to more IT professionals globally.
• Content sharing became easier with partners and bloggers and throughout BMC.com pages.
• Metrics and analytics improved. blip.tv features a fine statistics, which allows to have a nice picture of which videos and topics are the most popular and what people's viewing habits are.
• Flexibility and content tagging improved, which contributes to site searchability improvement.
• Work process streamlines: new BMCtv site allows BMC team to post new videos without any dependency on direct web or IT service support.
• RSS syndication is now available, that allows site RSS subscribers be aware of the new video appearing on site.

The Project

The project was brought into reality thanks to the  joint cooperations from BMC Software, Inc. and Quintagroup company. BMCtv site's internal structure was created in collaboration with Tom Parish, social media and social networking specialist. BMCtv site development was carried out by specialists from Quintagroup, a professional open source company, focused on Plone based content management solutions, internet marketing, hosting, Plone development and consulting.

Quintagroup delivered:

• Plone customization & integration
• Plone theme
• Hosting
• Technical support

Organizing Content

Videos are primarily organized by channels and subchannels. Each channel covers a major topic in IT infrastructure applications: for IT Professionals, for CIOs, CMDB and ITIL, Business Service Management, Partner Success, Customer Success, BMC Userworld, Education and Speeches and Events.

Videos can live within multiple channels at any one time. This is possible due to the sophisticated tagging developed specifically for such purpose. According to the tags the video possess it becomes available in this or that channel. As a result a video can live in several channels at one time.

Each channel page shows:
       -  a featured video
       -  a list of sub-channels (if available)
       -  a list of more videos in the channel with screenshots to the video (if uploaded)

Each video page displays:
       -  a video flash
       -  a list of channels a video is filed under
       -  a list of additional resources

Featured and Topical Video Content

The homepage includes two lists of Featured videos and Topical videos.

Video items, that are displayed in these two listings are:

• either manually chosen by the web editors - in this case the editor browses the site's folder structure for the desired video using Plone's content browser
• or added to the list automatically - those video will be added that meet the listing's criteria

Web editors can select any number of videos to appear in Featured and Topical lists.

Editor Tools

Plone CMS is a fine platform for effective and easy content management by itself. Besides default Plone editor tools, BMCtv website editors have some more useful tools added to enhance site's usability.

New content types were developed to manage video channels, video items, the tagging system etc. Besides, there is an Editor Tool Box implemented. That is a box, that appears under the navigation after the editor is logged in. The box includes quick links to the corresponding site sections the editor most often works with.