Wolters Kluwer Case Study

Full Fat Things Delivers Core Digital Infrastructure for Wolters Kluwer’s Product Suite

About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer is a market leading global information services company with 19,000 employees whose information, software, and services help legal, tax, finance, and healthcare professionals in over 150 countries. Wolters Kluwer combine information and technology to help their customers’ quality and effectiveness, for example supporting 210,000 tax and accountancy firms worldwide; that’s 40 million tax returns!

The challenge

Simplified journey

Multi-device access

Product integration

Wolters Kluwer's goal was to simplify the customer journey in accessing their suite of products. They wanted to refresh their products into one technology platform and move to a model where their customers can access their products across multiple devices.

Wolters Kluwer owned a collection of platforms that supported their product portfolio and wished to create new products for their markets from their vast content base. They were specifically interested in entitlement, authentication and customer self-management.

Out approach

System integration

Modernised CMS

Data migration

Drupal-powered flexibility

Full Fat Things initially gained the trust and understanding of the Wolters Kluwer executive team by meeting with product and IT stakeholders to map out business operations. We found what their current business processes were and what their requirements would be in the future. Their internal system maps were used to support the move to digital by ensuring the new build integrated directly with the right systems and supported their customers, wherever they are.

The first step was to remove legacy software. It was becoming expensive to maintain and hindered their product growth. Wolters Kluwer wanted to reinvigorate their technology and create a more efficient content management system.

We migrated data from SAP, Broadvision, NXT, Documentum, and even legacy content stores based in Revision Control System (RCS). Wolters Kluwer now has the option to build their own content in a ‘shopping cart’ approach. Drupal enables this content management using their regular concepts.

One central customer portal

The customer portal manages all entitlement and authorisation. This allows the flow of users from universities, large corporates and other single sign-on sources, whilst also providing single sign-on via SAML to our content applications.

We built the content applications in Drupal. We built the customer portal and single sign on system in Laravel. Drupal powers all of the content platforms, and all sign-ins took place as a result of SAML sign-in requests “assertions” from the customer portal. The customer portal is called “Digital Back Office” in the diagram.

Large-scale migration

The content applications contain vast amounts of data – around 19 million documents. This huge database needed to be separated and simplified for an easier user experience. We wrote a large-scale migration of content from their various forms, such as Broad Vision, NXT, PDF, HTML and even RCS into Drupal.

We also migrated the customers records from the previous customer databases spread around the legacy product set. We additionally built an extendable IP access solution. This allowed people to get access to content on a recognised and permitted IP address, but continue to use it wherever they were, as long as they signed in back in at their office location from time to time. This allowed for more remote working for Wolters Kluwer customers who travel to their own customer locations – people like accounting auditors.

SEO

We put Wolters Kluwer into the Google Flexible Sampling Scheme to get more content into Google search engines and increase their search footprint. This increased the subscriber rate. We partnered with Algolia search to provide real time faceted search results. Having a very fast search over many millions of documents is a real differentiator against competitor products, which often offer slow awkward search solutions.

We built a number of ‘finder’ tools, including: ‘Statute finder’, ‘HMRC Manuals finder’, ‘Legal case finder’ and ‘Legal standards finder’. These allow users to search content within the 19 million documents of the site to find legislative information. Drupal uses content metadata to power the lookup, so the site can deliver the pages customers need, quickly.

Outside of legislation we built many other tools, including contract creation tools, chemical database research apps, and integrations with eCPD applications to name a few.