Major project in record time - Relaunch cgm.com

A relaunch in record time: Within 6 months, we implemented a comprehensive relaunch for CompuGroup Medical (CGM) using a greenfield approach. The basis is the open source CMS "Neos".

However, this project is much more than the original relaunch. In addition to numerous further developments, we also operate a highly complex infrastructure for CGM.

We also won the "Neos Silver Award 2022" for this project

Find out more about this exciting project in this case study.

Who is CGM?

Since 1987, today's CompuGroup Medical (CGM) has been working on the vision of a digitalized healthcare system.

CGM operates in one of the most exciting and at the same time most sensitive sectors: healthcare.

Its core business includes software for doctors, medical practices and hospitals as well as products for networking healthcare professionals with each other and between healthcare professionals and patients.

Company divisions:

Ambulatory Information Systems: Information systems for doctors and dentists in private practice
Hospital Information Systems: Information systems for hospitals, laboratories, rehabilitation and nursing care
Pharmacy Information Systems: Information systems for pharmacies

Website: https://www.cgm.com/

CompuGroup Medical (CGM) in figures

1987

Foundation

>9.000

Employees

1.19 billion

Turnover in EUR (2023)

Countries active

The challenge - the relaunch!

CGM's previous website was outdated, based on an old CMS and offered little potential for updating or further development as part of a relaunch.

In particular, the restrictions on the use of modern digital marketing tools and strategies and the provision of new digital services on the website were decisive factors in CGM's decision to carry out a complete relaunch.

For CGM, this "greenfield" approach meant that not only the company's main website, but also the websites of 7 CGM subsidiaries had to be relaunched.

The aim was to rethink the company's entire website with a new infrastructure and a future-proof CMS. This CMS had to be flexible, secure and open to new technologies.

Punkt.de GmbH was able to convince CGM of"Neos" as a suitable CMS and at the same time offer the right infrastructure for a high-performance and robust environment. in addition, we integrated the previous agency "Kaufmann Digital" into the relaunch project and took over the project management.

A project of this size with a very tight schedule requires close coordination between the agencies involved and the client. Punkt.de GmbH took on a key role as project manager; in addition to the previous development agency "Kaufmann Digital", our long-standing partner agency "made in" was appointed for all topics relating to Design, UI and UX was included in the project.

A well-structured concept for design, UI and UX was just as important for this project as a well-thought-out infrastructure in advance. Both existing systems (CRMs, marketing tools, content sources, etc.) and new solutions had to be developed and integrated in order to be able to offer modern marketing and various services in a targeted manner.

As CGM is active in over 60 countries worldwide and has sites in over 20 countries, languages and language dimensions play a major role in the relaunch. In addition to numerous languages, CGM serves a broad target group in the healthcare sector with its services and products. This complexity results in over 2000 domains, which also had to be mapped and managed by the CMS.

Due to the size and diversification of the company, it was also very important to set up the new CMS in such a way that over 200 editors could work with the system simultaneously if required. The solution had to take extensive authorization and approval processes into account.

CGM's core business in the healthcare sector is a highly sensitive area in which compliance and data protection are very important. In addition to the legal framework conditions, the design not only had to meet the legal requirements of the GDPR, but also implement automated deletion concepts. Of course, punkt.de GmbH also had to design the corresponding physical infrastructure to be fail-safe (high-availability, HA).

Implementing these requirements within 6 months in terms of design, UI and UX as well as technically for development and infrastructure is only possible with well-established processes and agile project management. This also requires a client that understands agile working and pulls together with the agencies. We succeeded in doing this with CGM, we launched in June 2020 and the new website went live in January 2021. A complete success!

Of course, after the relaunch is before the relaunch and we are continuing to work on this project. In the following section you will find some details about the implementation of the relaunch.

CompuGroup Medical (CGM) is active in the e-health sector in over 20 countries with 14 languages under different legal conditions. This requires a website with enormous complexity.

>2.000

Domains

>22

Country pages

>200

Editors

Languages

Open Source & Neos

Projects of this size entail their own problems, whose solution concepts then flow into the further development of the Neos "core", among other things, and can be further developed by the community as open source contributions.

Punkt.de GmbH is very actively involved in the further development of Neos and continues to develop the so-called "core" of Neos with its own developer resources together with the community.

Functions & modules in Neos

The fact that we have "core" developers in our Neos teams means that innovative functions or concepts from customer projects can be incorporated into the "core" of Neos and at the same time the customer benefits from the fact that these very important functions will be further developed by a broad community in the future.

This project has also shown that, in addition to some functions in Neos that are important for CGM, it has also been possible to incorporate some concepts into the "core", thus truly living the open source concept.

Insights into the project - functions & modules

Neos Core

Media Management: This is already a core function of Neos for media asset management, which has been further developed as part of the CGM project, e.g. to favor collections and automatically convert video files to different transmission bandwidths in order to adaptively output them as a stream for users.
Domainredirect: A special module for easy management of over 2000 CGM domains, redirects and certificates via Neos in a user-friendly view.
Redirect Importer: A stand-alone importer for large quantities of redirect changes, so that changes can be implemented quickly and securely.
Url Monitoring:In addition to the standard monitoring of the status of websites, editors have been given the option of independently marking websites as "important", which are then automatically included in the monitoring.
Content analysis: For websites with a lot of content, it is important to relieve the editors and perform certain plausibility checks automatically, e.g. finishers, buttons and forms are checked and errors are displayed. This allows editors to notice and edit them directly.
Edit Conflict Prevention: With over 200 editors worldwide, it is important to prevent two editors from editing a page at the same time and overwriting each other. The "Edit Conflict Prevention" shows the editor when a conflict occurs and which editor is currently working on the page.
Shared workspaces: In addition to the Neos workspaces that were already part of the core, the concept has been expanded so that CGM and e.g. content groups can see and edit new content together, including feedback functions and approval process.
Language and country dimensions: With over 20 country pages and 15 languages, a simple concept was developed to easily configure and, if necessary, restrict the corresponding combinations on sister pages. For example, only certain languages are available.

CGM modules

Taxonomy management: In order to facilitate the reusability of content and the categorization of campaigns along the entire lead funnel, a taxonomy concept for the website data was implemented in coordination with CGM. Among other things, business units can be linked to segments and products and thus assigned to target groups. This is then also used in tracking for evaluations.
Voting feature: Internal company-wide voting system
Emergency page/emergency communication: A function that allows complete pages to be replaced with, for example, a message for crisis communication with users and customers.
A/B testing: Simple management of an A/B split test to test the conversion and then easily implement the test winner. In addition, full integration into your own tracking with the option of heatmaps.
Imprint / Legal Entity Handling: As there are a multitude of different legal entities worldwide, this function was developed to facilitate administration and ensure that the correct "Legal Entity" for the corresponding page is also displayed in the footer.
Cookie banners: CGM's own cookie banners, which were created on the basis of a package from our partner agency Kaufmann Digital, can be maintained in the Neos backend, including layout and selection options.
Calculators: Various individual calculators and their logic were implemented as React applications and integrated as content elements in Neos.
E-commerce: Flexible Sylius store integration for CGM products in Neos
Complex forms: Individual and sometimes very complex forms were implemented in Neos for CGM. These can be dynamic, multi-page or equipped with certain properties such as "double opt in" or certain "validators". The simple integration of iFrames is also possible.
SAP connection: A connection to CGM's SAP has been developed for customer data and forms, which is constantly being further developed.
Evalanche connection: Evalanche was connected for easy newsletter management. For example, downloads are only possible after the respective user has logged in, etc.
Elastic-Search : Elastic-Search was chosen for the search; this powerful and very high-performance search was adapted and expanded to meet the needs of CGM.
Investor Relations: To protect sensitive areas, such as investor relations, security functions were built in to make access very restrictive for editors.
Event hub: An event area has been developed for the various formats of CGM with a range of functions that provide an overview of events as well as the management of e.g. registration or the creation of landing pages for events.
Web analysis: Tracking and web analysis for CGM is carried out via Matomo; the corresponding setup and configuration for events and taxonomy is also integrated. This also enables the use of heat maps.
...and much more!

We received the "Silver Award" at the Neos Awards 2022 for the project.

It is also particularly nice that the open source community has also benefited from many of our developments. Since we rely on open source wherever possible and sensible, this means that everything we (further) develop also benefits the corresponding projects, in this case Neos CMS. This includes improvements to rights management, the upload UI and much more.

You can find more information about the award here:

https://www.neoscon.io/de/neos-cms-award-2022.html

Post relaunch - further development of cgm.com

We are very proud to have implemented a project of this size in such a short time.

Together with our partners for design and UI & UX from "made in" and"Kaufmann Digital" on the development side, it was possible to implement the project efficiently.

After the relaunch is before the relaunch and together with "made in", punkt.de GmbH is working closely with CGM on the continuous further development of cgm.com and the underlying technical infrastructure, which we support.

Our Product Owners (PO) of the developer and DevOps teams regularly coordinate the upcoming sprints in jour fixes as part of the agile working method in order to keep up with the latest technological developments at CGM.

Our partner for design - UI & UX

This case study has a clear focus on our technical implementation, but our partner agency"made in" has created its own detailed case study to cover the topics of design, UI & UX.

It's worth taking a look at this case study too:

made in - CGM Case Study (Design - UI & UX)

Here you can also find out more about the development of the design system for CGM and the overall design concept that was developed together with punkt.de and CGM.

We have been working very successfully with "made in" on major projects since 2012. The result is once again impressive for CGM!