Insurer Itzehoer Versicherungen: Website Relaunch with e-Spirit Content Management

Dortmund, Germany, February 25, 2011 --(PR.com)-- New website for insurance company Itzehoer Versicherungen (www.itzehoer.de): The corporate website relaunch marks the culmination of the company's efforts over the past two years to rework its Internet- and intranet projects and migrate to a future-viable content management system (CMS). A cornerstone of the project's success was the FirstSpirit CMS from e-Spirit AG. The FirstSpirit system will now be able to bring to bear all of its strengths in terms of efficiency in managing nine web projects and this will allow Itzehoer to benefit from a range of synergistic effects: Used as the central content management platform, FirstSpirit allows even complex content to be easily reused for different web channels. This way the insurance provider saves time and money. The provider, which is based in northern Germany, can also use the CMS to realize its goals for transparency and service orientation in customer communication: As a private company based on an association with legal capacity, the policy holders are also members – and thus are not only customers, but also partners. The successful web project has been implemented with support from management and IT consultancy Acando GmbH.

Minimal administrative costs

Itzehoer Insurance has sophisticated requirements for flexibility and service capability in a CMS: In addition to its own websites, the company's system is also linked to the off-line intranet of union representatives, the Deutsche Pensionskasse AG site, as well as various subsidiary sites. Thanks to FirstSpirit's user-friendliness, Itzehoer can reduce the costs of maintaining all these sites. This is a critical success factor in being able to provide information quickly and always updated. The editors come from different departments, such as IT, Marketing, or Claims, and can update text quickly and easily all by themselves thanks to the outstanding usability of the system. FirstSpirit also makes it possible to reuse the same content for a variety of output channels. This opens up potential savings in the administration of all the various intranet and Internet projects. Content only has to be created once and can then be linked to different sites.

Information pool for new website

In the most recent project, the corporate site relaunch, the objective was to integrate various database content types, such as press releases, deadlines, and job announcements. Here the company was able to upgrade the CMS very easily using an additional integration module. Using it the existing MySQL databases can be linked to FirstSpirit in just a few minutes. The information pool of the databases is thus also directly available in the CMS for the new website. "e-Spirit met all of our requirements for a state-of-the-art, modern, and economical content management. The relaunch of our website went off smoothly and with FirstSpirit we will be able to provide significantly more content in less time with the same number of editors," observes Marcus Dau, developer and consultant in the CMS-/web department at IVI Informationsverarbeitungs GmbH, the IT company at Itzehoer Insurance.

Following the corporate website relaunch in late 2010, the next important step is scheduled for 2011 with the FirstSpirit CMS: the consolidation of the three existing extranets to form a centralized system.

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