Client Stories

Microsoft

A small development team from Governor Technology is quietly helping Microsoft to strengthen one of the web's most important and lucrative brands.

Microsoft's content rich portal MSN is the sixth most visited website on the planet, and ninth most popular site in the UK.  Localised into over 40 country and regional markets, it has a market share of 15% of all internet users, and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue every year.

Sitting behind all those regional sites are thousands of editors, using one of the most powerful, complex and feature rich Content Management Systems in the world to constantly deliver new, high quality content to targeted markets.

Supporting those editors is a development team from Governor Technology whose job is to make their lives as easy as possible, so they can concentrate on the content, and not worry about the technology.

Our team created a brand new set of 'common' templates for the editors. These templates have to work the same way across the different global markets, languages, and subject areas like news, movies, sport and money, whilst still giving the editors freedom to create pages that are individualised to the needs of their different audiences.

The MSN Content management system uses a base library of templates, called the GTL (Global Template Library). The Common Services Layer (CSL) was designed to elliminate inconsistencies in the GTL by providing a common repository through the use of Visual Studio Team Explorer and the extension of Visual Studio 2008. 

The project was delivered ahead of schedule in January 2009, to considerable acclaim from the target market editors. A successful handover was then completed to allow MSN to provide ongoing support via internal resources.