Halifax Installs Web Collaboration Tool

Halifax plc, the leading U.K. retail bank and mortgage lender, has selected Interwoven's Content Infrastructure for multiple Web and interactive television-based customer services, including www.halifax.co.uk, ntl.Halifax.co.uk and Halifax Online.

Halifax, which recently merged with Bank of Scotland to form the HBOS group, chose Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Interwoven primarily for its branching capability, or the development of multiple initiatives in parallel, as well as its ability to perform whole-site versioning. These allow Halifax staff to collaborate on and across different Web-based initiatives such as bank accounts, mortgages, insurance and personal loans.

Content Infrastructure allows Halifax to develop multiple Web initiatives simultaneously, collaborate across business teams and deploy information quickly and easily, according to Chris Milner, sales and communications manager for Halifax's e-commerce division. "Interwoven's branching expertise allows Halifax to update and create content quickly and simultaneously."

Branching removes the process bottleneck created by uploading content from external design and copywriting agencies to Halifax's editors for various customer-focused Web services. As a result, the Web team is no longer concerned with mundane publishing tasks and can focus on enterprise systems development and integration.

More than 80 Halifax Web design staff and content editors are based in and around Halifax and Leeds, West Yorkshire, U.K. and work with external design agencies to develop Web initiatives separately without disruption from wider platform integration, thanks to the Interwoven tool.

The Interwoven product enables Halifax to offer more dynamic services to registered customers through a secure, transactional Web environment. The product is being initially deployed on Online Holiday Money, a foreign currency and travelers check ordering service. The separation of form from functionality enables Halifax staff to change text quickly-within minutes instead of three working days, which previously were required as part of a full test cycle of a transactional Web site.

The product empowers employees and external specialists to develop Web content without creating a drain on IT resources, noted David Ogidi, managing director at Interwoven, United Kingdom and Ireland. "The power of branching is that it lets Halifax boost the level of service they can offer their varied customer base."

Separately, Interwoven announced that BB&T Corp. has implemented Content Infrastructure on its intranet site to manage enterprise content, from marketing data that feeds corporate Web sites to documents published to internally-facing applications. With more than 1,000 branch offices in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic states, the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based institution needed a content infrastructure that allowed employees to easily add content to the site.

"Content Infrastructure supports BB&T's plan to create an adaptive Web experience that meets the needs of employees while empowering everyone to contribute directly to the intranet," said Paal Kaperdal, e-business manager at $70.3 billion BB&T.

BB&T employees choose their own content creation tools and re-use existing content, making the Web publishing process more efficient.