"Digirati have proved to be extremely effective at delivering eRights projects and are particularly strong in their attention to the specific business requirements of each individual customer. On the Oxford University Press project Digirati demonstrated highly effective consultancy, engineering and integration skills, which, when coupled with the expertise they have developed in eRights, ensured the work was delivered to a very high standard."
Patrick King, EMEA Business - eMeta Division, Atypon Limited
Overview
Sector: Academic and Educational Publishing
Organisation Size: Oxford University Press (OUP) publishes more than 6,000 new publications a year, has offices in around fifty countries, and employs some 5,000 people worldwide.
Project Name: OUP Group Website Outsourcing Project
Audience: Students, children, academics, teachers, general public
Project Challenge: To overcome the limitations of OUP's existing Group websites' Access Control System by replacing it with a new platform that can provide one account across different business unit web sites.
Solution:
- Systems Analysis to establish existing business processes and new requirements
- Implementation of eMeta RightAccess
- Migration of existing subscriber base
- Provision of ongoing Support and Maintenance
Results:
- Business users empowered by richer functionality and flexibility
- Improved usability for both OUP staff and end-users
- Quicker time to market for new licensing models
- Specific Single-sign on and activation code requirements met
- Lower ongoing maintenance and development costs with less risk of knowledge gap if key staff move on
Key areas of interest:
- Systems Analysis
- License Management and Access rights
- System Integration
- Content Migration
- Application Support
Technology
URLs:
Scope currently excludes OUP Journals and Academic subscription websites.
Background
Oxford University Press (OUP) has a wide range of web assets that are managed and delivered using an Enterprise Content Management System and hosted externally within OUP's Group Web Environment. A significant proportion of that content requires various types of access control. Prior to our engagement this was managed by their own Access Control System (ACS) which had been developed in-house over several years.
OUP decided to replace this system due to a variety of reasons including functional constraints inherent within its design and a lack of ownership across the business divisions with the need for any configuration changes to go through the IT support process which took time and always incurred further internal costs.
Three specific factors were prominent in OUP's decision to replace their ACS:
1. There was a general requirement for a system easier to maintain underpinned with formal support contracts and service level agreements from a large specialist organization. rather than risk the knowledge loss with internal IT processes driven by one or two individuals.
2. A new requirement emerged from the Academic publishing division that the old system could not provide i.e access to protected student resources via activation codes printed in individual text books.
3. The requirement for single sign on across OUP's web presence: a common platform to provide the facility for each user to have one global OUP account rather than potentially having multiple accounts for different business unit web sites.
Technology Selection
A technology selection process was undertaken by measuring various systems against existing requirements. The proprietary eMeta eRights software was selected as the ideal platform. This software provides a set of components that can be described as "entitlements management" for protecting online assets. This system is completely independent to the concerns of asset or content management and vice versa. It can be used with any system or combination of systems (such as a Web CMS and an Asset Management system) on any singular platform or multiple platforms. This in turn means those systems do not have to be concerned with access control and enables a decoupled architecture eliminating any restrictive dependencies across the tiers.
eRights takes care of answering the question: "Who can access what and under what terms?". Many organisations (OUP included) have untapped revenue streams or development possibilities because of the difficulty in "productising" resources. This system makes this easy. It is used by many publishers because it allows for the creation and maintenance of fine grained and flexible licensing models including products, campaigns, special offers, trial versions and so on.
The Implementation
The initial stage of the project involved a series of workshops to understand existing business processes and develop optimal new processes based on the capabilities of eRights in line with identified business needs. Use Cases and Use Case Realisations were established followed by License, Access and Data Modelling.
eRights was set up as a hosted service rather than running on their own infrastructure alongside the web applications. The hosted eRights repository exposes a set of web services for OUP's Group website applications to consume. These web services define an OUP-specific set of business logic, which provides a clean architectural boundary and separation of concerns.
This framework is a clean, extensible platform. It provides multiple extension hooks for product-specific business logic to run. For example, in one site that uses this framework the registration process requires the user to redeem a soft token printed in a textbook - this behavior is plugged in to the framework for this particular web application.
The existing legacy user base for OUP's Group website was mapped and migrated to the new eRights repository using custom scripts.
One of OUP's more custom requirements was that a user's interaction with the Access Control screens should adopt the branding of the particular "product" the user is trying to access, or register for. Another customisation in the OUP project was the extensive capturing of marketing-related data on a product-by-product basis. Admin users can create groups of questions that they can associate with a product; these questions are then rendered using HTML forms components for a user to answer when registering for a product or viewing their profile.
Key Deliverables
OUP now have a system that is better for its customer end users as well as better for OUP staff. End users can manage all their OUP Group website "products" from a single "My Profile" interface - they can request new products, maintain their details, see when their licences will expire, change their login details and so on.
OUP admin users can now create new Group Website products without any IT department involvement. Here's an example:
Suppose a new textbook is going to be published. This will have an Online Resource Centre micro-site, with an area containing lecturer resources and an area containing student resources. If a user registers for the lecturer resources, they won't be granted access until they have confirmed their email address (an automated process) and been verified as a lecturer (a manual process). The business team come up with a set of questions (some free-text, others single valued selects, others multiple-choice, etc) that they want the lecturers to answer.
On the other hand, Users registering for the student area will be asked to enter a code printed in the book. The back end knows about these codes and will verify that the code entered is valid and hasn't been redeemed before. The users also have questions to answer before they can register (different questions in this case).
The business users can create the micro-site with its two separate protected sub-areas using their Content Management System, but crucially they can also configure all the access control related features above using nothing more than a simple web interface. End users will see highly customised sign up processes, but at no point was any further development work necessary to get the micro-site up and running and protected.
