In December of 2006 swiss international airlines invited us to present the new Web Content Management functionality of MOSS2007. The idea was to use MOSS2007 for the re-launch of their public internet site www.swiss.com .

Here's a high-level overview about the requirements:

  • Multi-lingual: supporting more than 10 countries and their local languages
  • Integrating a standard ASP.NET 2.0 based application for the flight-booking application
  • Very slim pages with short download times
  • Multi-lingual forms with special validation and submit logic
  • Easy to use content management functionality
  • Configurable presenter for announcing news in a slide-show style
  • Easy to use Translation functionality
  • Re-use of master-pages and page-layouts for upcoming intra- and extranet projects

In January 2007 we decided to invest several days for a proof-of-concept (PoC). During this PoC we've installed the necessary environment, designed the architecture for the multi-lingual concept and implemented several parts of the site.

In the February timeframe we started to implement the site hierarchy and the implementation of the variations. The real development of the necessary web parts started in March. On june, 14th we went life and here's a sample showing you how this site looks like:

In the next few posts I'll describe some of the challenges we had during the implementation.

-thomas