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American Society for Microbiology

With over 30,000 members, including researchers, educators and health professionals, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is one of the largest life science societies in the world. The mission of ASM is to advance the microbiological sciences as a vehicle for understanding life processes and to apply and communicate this knowledge for the improvement of health and environmental and economic well-being worldwide.

ASM monitor device mock-up
Technologies
Azure Cognitive Search, Kentico Xperience, Xperience MVC
Services
Content Management System, Design, Development, Digital Marketing, Integration
Industry
Science and Research
Awards

Kentico Site of the Year Finalist, Gold Circle Award Winner

Live Site
asm.org

Results

BizStream helped ASM with a Kentico Xperience implementation, including other integrations, such as: Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search, NetForum, Shibboleth, and more. ASM is incredibly happy with the project results and has seen the following impact to their web presence:

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Page Views per Month
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Increase in Web Traffic
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Uptick in Author Submissions

BizStream created a custom system to eliminate duplicate content for ASM. The content audits were able to reorganize a site of 20,000 pages to a more streamlined and manageable 3,000 pages. From there, BizStream was able to reduce the number of 404 errors to almost none.

ASM Advocacy screenshot
ASM phone and tablet device mock-up

With the aim to set up the American Society for Microbiology for the future with tagged, structured content, ASM’s digital team worked with the developers at BizStream to open up the box at Kentico and make templates and models the staff could use in a multitude of ways. Multiple integrations, tag-based aggregation, and a flexible taxonomy earned ASM a best website award and laid a foundation to serve ASM’s 30K+ members and advance microbiology.

Courtney Reyers
Senior Manager, Digital Strategy

Challenges

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Design

  • Create a rich interactive visual design that departmental leaders could agree on.
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Search

  • Deliver an aggregated result of a single topic or tag of content across multiple content types that merged into one cohesive design.
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Usability

  • Custom Single Sign-on (SSO) capabilities needed to be a part of the site for members to log in, access content based on their subscription, and manage account preferences.
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Solution Architecture

  • Assist ASM in finding the right hosting and CMS platform for the new website.
  • Help ASM marry its content strategy and governance within a CMS-based website.
  • Secure content, gate content, and have role-based content access to its membership.
  • Provide a solution to handle thousands of URLs and URL patterns across their 27 existing sites resulting in thousands of 404 errors.
  • Develop the new site in a way so that future development could be easily extended for coming phases and set up for performing content personalization.
  • Site-wide and bidirectional integration with NetForum (ASM’s main AMS for tracking membership) for authentication and authorization for the website.
  • Create a system to manage duplicate content and content that belongs under multiple categories.
  • Managing the project scope to the mandated timeline.
ASM laptop device mock-up

Solutions

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Design

  • ASM provided wireframes as a guide to help the BizStream team implement full-color, high-res designs for various mobile and desktop devices. The new design executes ASM’s vision for a fresh, clean look that celebrates microbiology and stays true to the ASM brand.
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Development

  • Our team leveraged the ASP.NET MVC development on Kentico Xperience 12.0 Enterprise, allowing BizStream to create custom MVC widgets with the Kentico Xperience Page Builder aspect of Kentico Xperience MVC.
  • Bidirectional Integration with NetForum and Kentico Xperience for security roles and permissions allowed admins to control access to particular sections of the site to address concerns of content quality and consistency.
  • BizStream’s development team heavily customized the Azure Cognitive Search capabilities within Kentico Xperience to provide a rich search experience.
  • We built multiple Kentico Xperience customizations (form controls, custom tagging system, custom scheduled tasks, and more) to enable digital marketers to easily control their content's taxonomy.
  • We created custom authentication logic for SSO with Kentico Xperience and Shibboleth / SAML2.
  • BizStream created a custom cache-busting implementation for blazing fast performance of front-end resources, improving overall SEO scores.
  • Our team implemented a custom default system as a fallback for metadata input. This ensured that content would be available for social platforms to pick up even if content admins had not filled manually filled out the fields.
  • BizStream developers built the site to allow for global, site-wide updates while allowing page-specific overrides through checkboxes. This allowed content admins to manage content and CTAs throughout the site easily.
  • We created a system for 301 redirects and flexible page URL creation to address the 404 errors.
  • RSS feeds per content type and tag were implemented for content publishing and notifications. This allowed other sites to easily consume ASM's content.
  • We integrated with Libsyn to handle podcast content.​
  • ASM and BizStream choose a cloud-based hosting platform based on existing assets that ASM IT also manages.​
  • The BizStream team created a system to auto-archive content that allowed the ASM team to pick a time frame in which content would be automatically archived.
  • BizStream provided virtual and onsite training to ASM's digital marketing, IT, and development teams.
  • A custom user preference center was implemented inside of the Kentico site to allow email marketing contacts to update email preferences within the site as well as NetForum.
  • Our team executed a custom ShareThis implementation to make content easily shareable to social networks.
  • The custom content tagging system was leveraged to create aggregate landing pages used throughout the site automatically. The pages are all automatically generated, saving content editors vast amounts of time since they don't have to link pages manually.
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Kentico Xperience 12.0 Features and Tools

  • MVC Development Methodology and excellent Kentico API
  • MVC Page Builder, Widgets, and Page Templates
  • Out of the box and customized Azure Cognitive Search integration
  • Document Tags and Categories
  • Custom Tables
  • Scheduled Tasks
  • Web Farm System
  • Custom Settings
  • Security module for users, roles, and permissions
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Azure Cognitive Search Features and Tools

  • Multiple Cognitive Search Indexes
  • Federated Search
  • Scoring Profiles
  • Dynamic Facets
  • REST API
  • .NET SDK
  • Key Phrase Extraction
  • Synonyms
  • Auto-complete
  • Power BI Reporting Template
ASM Home page screenshot

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American Society for Microbiology

Content Management System // Design // Development // Digital Marketing // Integration
ASM laptop device mock-up
All Projects

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