Microsoft

"The Forrit CMS was a critical instrument to Microsoft Education’s success in launching resources to help our customers quickly make the transition to remote learning. The CMS is well suited to responding to multiple stakeholder inputs in real-time and gave us the tools we needed to roll out a large site expansion, for multiple markets globally, in a very fast turnaround. The website’s infrastructure Forrit built on Azure properly supported our large traffic spikes, ensuring the user experience was never disrupted. 

“The very global nature of our business means that our websites need to be understood by millions of people around the world. However, manually translating content into 45 languages was a time consuming and expensive process – which was then added to as we imported the new content onto our system. We reached out to Forrit for help in automating this process to reduce the time we spent on translation, and it’s made a massive difference in how quickly we can get the content out to market. It’s simple, fast, and easy to use. Forrit’s solution is so quick, we can expand to additional markets practically on demand.” Liza Magee, Director, Microsoft Education

Summary:

Microsoft Education inspires, informs and supports lifelong learning. Forrit has worked with Microsoft Education for a number of years, originally rebuilding its website to run seamlessly internationally. Latterly, Forrit helped to automate the process of translating content into 45 languages. Forrit’s platform has provided Microsoft Education with a secure, high-performing website that meets global traffic demands. Forrit’s localisation tool has reduced language translation timelines from weeks to days.

Challenges:

Forrit was initially engaged to rebuild the Microsoft Education website which was struggling to handle growing levels of traffic from around the world and had no local language versions. More recently, the surge in remote learning brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, increased the demand for localised content. The existing manual localisation process, in most cases, would take up to a month, with additional time to re-import translated content into the CMS. Microsoft Education needed a solution that would make the process quicker and allow them to better plan and manage global content.  

Solutions:

The Microsoft Education website was rebuilt on Forrit’s platform within five weeks, and seven datacentres around the world were used to ensure the website was able to handle large volumes of traffic. Forrit’s localisation tool has automated the previous manual process. It has enabled content editors to batch content within the CMS – specific pages or entire sites – and automatically send to a translation service. A traffic light system lets editors monitor status and progress, and translated content can be reimported quickly, without developer intervention.

Benefits:

Forrit’s platform has provided Microsoft Education with a secure, high-performing website that is able to support large traffic spikes. Forrit’s localisation tool has optimised Microsoft Education’s localisation process and reduced language translation times from weeks to days. It has reduced project management time and resource, and completely removed the need for developer time. Microsoft Education can now publish localised campaigns and content simultaneously with its core US market.