Kraai Consulting - H&R Block Turns to Kraai Consulting to Deploy New Help Content Solution

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H&R Block Turns to Kraai Consulting to Deploy New Help Content Solution
Marck 5, 2007

H&R Block (HRB) needed a way to quickly create and import a large amount of Help content into a Content Management system that could serve both the Serviceware application and the new Tango Online Tax product. This needed to be accomplished in a short amount of time while maintaining the company’s high standard for customer products. HRB turned to Kraai Consulting, LLC. (Kraai) and the Vignette suite of software products to implement its new Help content solution.

Project timeframes were tight and rapid development and deployments were essential. The system needed to manage hierarchical and interrelated content and be able to ship that content to Serviceware, a third party application.

Kraai used the Vignette Business Integration Studio (VBIS) with Vignette’s Content Management System (CMS). They provided expertise in writing a custom deployment to move new and updated content from the authoring environment to the Help content product. HRB provided custom spreadsheets that became the Help content. The content load was complicated due to the ongoing efforts to provide data as well as the interrelationship of the different pieces of content.

VBIS, combined with custom tools from Kraai, enabled the consultants to react to changing spreadsheets and build the hierarchical interrelated Help content into the system. The formats of the spreadsheets became less important due to the flexibility of VBIS for loading this type of data. Vignette CMS allowed Kraai the flexibility to change the model of the content as the requirements evolved. While time did not provide an ideal development cycle, the flexibility of the Vignette products, the Kraai consultants’ expertise and the domain expertise of HRB allowed for course changes when needed.

About Kraai Consulting

Kraai Consulting, LLC. (www.kraai.com) is an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consulting firm. ECM is a broad field consisting of Web Content Management and Portal, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Records Management, Document Management, Imaging and Workflow, and Search. Our goal is to create a set of ECM practices in each product line based on deep technical experience (implementation and maintenance) tied together with solid research and strategy capabilities to promote the best possible client ROI.

The company is headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas, and operates a branch office in Scottsdale, Arizona.