The AIA Portal

Satisfying 68,000 Demanding Members with Discriminating Taste - 24/7

Architects are analytical and artistic--and the epitome of individualism. So when the American Institute of Architects (AIA) needed to redesign its website, they decided they needed something that spoke to their membership.

Now each member can create and control a personalized webpage (MyAIA) at www.aia.org to meet his or her professional needs and interests: selecting among nearly two dozen interest areas, accessing essential business tools and a calendar of events, checking job postings, participating in online seminars, getting real-time answers to questions about architecture and design, perusing industry news, and more.

How was this possible? PPC deployed the Plumtree Corporate Portal, specifically and thoroughly customized to meet AIA's needs.

In the first phase of the project, the PPC team worked closely with AIA staff to identify and categorize the content they wanted to present, brought the content in house on a file server, and then trained the staff in this process. With Plumtree, the problem of sharing information taken from diverse applications without having to convert everything to HTML was eliminated. This means information is shared almost instantaneously instead of weeks. To publish content, AIA staff simply had to "click, drag, and drop" a document into a designated folder. Thanks to the "crawlers" (like the "spiders" that Web search engines use) that the portal sends out each night to identify and retrieve new documents, the information is available on the website the next morning. (In phase two, this process was reworked to include more graphical documents [i.e., in HTML and not in the source format], working to convert everything to HTML.)

Still, the members wanted more. Although a typical portal works for most, the architects wanted a website that reflected the world of architecture--sleek, stylish, and aesthetically pleasing. So in phase two of the project, PPC teamed with the design firm Carton Donofrio Partners Inc. to create a new graphical look and layout for the website, for which PPC reconfigured and further customized the Plumtree platform to achieve what AIA wanted, including a process for converting and publishing source documents as graphical, professional-looking web pages.

To help AIA ensure that members are getting what they want, PPC installed its own PTTracker to capture and analyze usage patterns. The result for the AIA members is a website that is fast, easy to use, and attractive. The ultimate result for the AIA is a portal that not only caters to its members but actively involves them in the mission of the American Institute of Architects.

TOOLS
Plumtree 4.5 Corporate Portal
PPC's PTTracker
Microsoft Active Server Pages
Microsoft Internet Information Services
Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Microsoft Visual Studio .Net
Microsoft Windows 2000 server

CONTACT INFORMATION
Dale Tuttle
Project Performance Corporation
703-748-7065
dtuttle@ppc.com