Serving the largest city in Canada, the Toronto-based utilities company has a great responsibility to service its customers as it distributes around 18% of the electricity consumed in Ontario. As the company serves so many it is important their website can support many concurrent users so that information can be easily accessible.
Users per second
during outages
Accessibility compliant
Uptime
Building a Risk Management Portal.
This Toronto-based utilities company was struggling with the performance and usability on their legacy platform which hosted their website and client portal. The company website was outdated thus creating a failing customer experience and was in need of a modern update. The old website did not meet the Canadian Government’s standards of accessibility. Thus as a public government organization, special attention would need to be given to the new website so it could be accessed by all. Moreover, during times of high traffic, such as storms/outages, the website was unable to support a larger volume of concurrent users. As people often come to their website with a strict purpose it was difficult to find information on the website because the website had poor search capabilities.
Thinking inside and outside the box
Veriday was selected to work with the utilities company’s development team to deploy a platform to replace the legacy system and build their solutions. Veriday would utilize Liferay as the Digital Experience Platform to build both the website and the customer portal.
Veriday developers worked with developers onsite at the utilities company. The process of development started with educating and training the utilities company developers on Liferay. The blended nature of the team allowed the scope to be altered without any barriers of communication and allowed the project to be developed seamlessly. The site was redesigned to meet industry best practices for the ease of access to the customer.
Long-term success
Liferay was a good fit for the utilities website as it has more customization tools than its competitors as well as its open source integration functionality. The new website performed better than the old and supported a large volume of users during times of high traffic. Another major goal that was achieved is to permit the business units to manage and curate the web site without IT involvement. The site also passed the accessibility audit for AODA compliance and responsiveness.
Sompo
