Taxand

RealDecoy rebuilt and restructured Taxand’s public website, and gave it a new look to attract more bids and new member firms. Solera, an Ottawa marketing firm, was responsible for the projects’ design and planning while RealDecoy was responsible for development. After an investigation phase with Solera and Taxand, we recommended the use of Drupal as the Content Management System (CMS).

THE CHALLENGE

Rebuilding the web site

Taxand’s existing public site was cumbersome to use and Taxand had a number of objectives that they had to meet in re-launching their corporate website. RealDecoy was given the task of rebuilding an English language public site to serve as an information tool about Taxand’s member firms in various countries, enabling visitors to come in and view information about those firms, including key contact information. They also wanted visitors to have the ability to see news and events about the tax industry in general.

A custom real estate tool

Additionally, Taxand wanted a special custom tool providing a listing of real estate income rates for every country that has a member firm belonging to the organization. They also wanted a way to remind site administrators at these member firms to input information into the real estate income rates tool on a quarterly basis.

Publishing articles on the web

Taxand also required a custom article management tool for publishing articles on their existing public website. This was problematic as the current site’s architecture was not meant to be populated with articles. Instead, it was meant to be a static-page site about member firms. So a new structure and tool was needed to allow Taxand to publish articles on the website.

OUR SOLUTION

Consulting with Taxand, RealDecoy was able to provide a website that catered to the client’s needs. This included a list of the member firms with pertinent information and staff biographies, along with links to careers, news and media page sections for each of the member companies.

Implementing Drupal

RealDecoy also implemented a Content Management System (CMS) using Drupal. This solution enabled Taxand to easily maintain their constantly changing content.

Keeping content up to date

That’s not all. RealDecoy also developed a new solution for the real estate income rate information. The solution allows administrators for each member country to log in and enter the real estate income rate for their respective country as needed.

The tool also sends reminders to the member firms to update this information two weeks before the end of a fiscal quarter. If a member firm hasn’t updated this information, a reminder e-mail is sent to the Taxand website administrator so that this person can contact the member firm in question to remind them to make the update.

Technologies:

Drupal, MySQL database

At the same time that RealDecoy was building the corporate website for Taxand, we were developing an extranet site to allow its member firms access to information about other members.

THE CHALLENGE:

A members only site

Taxand wanted an extranet site built for its member firms’ staff. Drupal CMS was selected in order to keep the site consistent with the public Taxand site. The extranet required a list of different member firms, and a resource listing of different member firm contacts. The site needed to act as an internal file sharing and information tool. This would allow members to share different resources, such as executive committee Annual General Meeting (AGM) notes, or new items like upcoming tax litigation that might affect tax laws in a particular country.

A challenge for RealDecoy was that the extranet site was difficult to implement in Drupal, as that Content Management System (CMS) does not allow for file sharing natively. RealDecoy was tasked with coming up with a solution on a fairly tight timeline.

Added to the challenge was working with a client in the United Kingdom, who was five hours ahead. This required more attention to be paid to the scheduling of deliverables and meetings.

OUR SOLUTION:

Using Drupal

RealDecoy was able to overcome tight deadlines by working long hours to produce a file sharing system that would work within the constraints of Drupal.

RealDecoy migrated information existing within Taxand’s old content management tool to the new system in Drupal. RealDecoy had to change default behaviors in the CMS so that only members who were properly logged into the system would have access to its page content. The site also allows only member firms to have access to the site while allowing them to manage their contact listing and dynamic file information.

RealDecoy also built custom tools to allow Taxand to export and import contact list files to and from Excel spreadsheets.

In the end, we developed an extranet that had dynamic content, was easy to maintain, and provided a fresh look for Taxand’s internal communications.

Technologies:

Drupal, php