The UK Ministry of Defence – Army Cadet Force (ACF) consists of nearly 40,000 cadets and 10,000 volunteers. Delivering relevant information quickly and clearly is paramount to an efficient training process. To do this, the ACF needed an updated, online Resource Centre for cadets and volunteers that allowed them to find a wide breadth of information including regulations and policies, training documentation and videos, news, events, and more.

The previous iteration of the Resource Centre was implemented on SharePoint and was plagued with many of the same shortcomings that organizations have been experiencing with content management and content delivery for years: complex contribution processes for content, fragmented content and site locations, difficult management and deployment capabilities for sites, and outdated, unresponsive designs for tablet and mobile users. The solution to their problems was to move to Oracle Content Management (OCM).

With OCM, the ACF would have one centralized location to manage all aspects of their content and site. The cloud platform provides many capabilities to expedite the creation and maintenance of their new solution, including:

• • • Ability to model content types and create items for those types, so organizations have tailored assets to categorize and search across.
    • Simple publishing steps for content and no-downtime, one-click updates for live sites.
    • Ability to create websites in a few clicks with dozens of out-of-the-box components that can be leveraged to quickly build navigable websites with simple drag and drop, no-code processes.
    • Ability to use baseline site templates and themes to spin up new sites for different organizational units or regions, which can deliver from a separate set of content on OCM.
    • Developer-friendly tools and APIs to customize the look and feel, as well as extend functionality of sites with new modular components of their own.

The image above is a sample of what Fishbowl Solutions created in OCM for the UK Ministry of Defence – Army Cadet Force, not the final, live version.

With these tools in hand, Fishbowl Solutions worked closely with the ACF to identify pain points of the old system, migrate assets from SharePoint to Oracle Content Management, and design and build an entirely new Resource Centre site for their cadets and volunteers. The new mobile-responsive site features a custom search interface that allows users to locate, view, download, and share from an extensive library of thousands of documents stored on OCM.

The Resource Centre is now live for all cadets and volunteers and was taken from requirements-gathering to a production-ready state in less than five months. The new platform and contribution model have helped alleviate workload from the management team and provide an improved experience to the end-users across all devices. With newly streamlined capabilities and added benefits, ACF is looking forward to extending the contribution and site features in the near future.

If you’re interested in learning more about moving from SharePoint to Oracle Content Management, the out-of-the-box features included with OCM, or would like additional use case scenarios, please email us at [email protected]. If you’d like to read more about our work with OCM, you can check out our blog posts on the topic.