Web's Leading Portal for Human Resources Professionals Builds and Maintains Content-Rich Site with Allaire Business Platform

When it comes to independent, authoritative, and comprehensive resources for human resources, HR.com is rapidly becoming the portal of choice for HR professionals. Combining an online knowledge hub, community discussion, and convenient HR marketplace, HR.com offers value to all areas of HR functions, including compensation and benefits, information systems, management, labor relations, law, organizational development, staffing, training, and more.

From several areas of the site, HR professionals can research topics and find relevant articles, purchase a related book or research report, locate a consultant/vendor to help them, connect with a peer who has had a similar experience, or receive free advice from HR.com's experts. Community members can also visit the WaterCooler to ask other members of the community a question, or join an existing discussion. In addition, the HR.com Training Center, developed in alliance with TrainSeek.com™, provides access to more than 120,000 training products and programs that individuals can compare, preview, and buy online.

While HR.com maintains a flagship site directly accessible to any and all members (registration is free), a key component of its strategy is "Content ASP (Application Service Provider) Agreements," in which HR.com provides its portal as a value-added service to other sites and communities. For example, an online recruiting company or job-posting site might transparently link/embed the HR.com service within its own branded site.

"We wanted to create a site that would become a trusted resource for the human resources community," said Debbie McGrath, founder and chief executive of HR.com. "But we also wanted to leverage the excellent channels that partner sites can provide. We wanted to seize the first-mover advantage and that meant getting a quality site up very quickly."

Time To Market Is Critical Requirement
In November 1999, after outlining its ambitious vision for the site, HR.com evaluated its options for a software foundation. Teaming with webworld studios, inc., an Allaire Premier Partner based in the Washington, D.C. area, HR.com aimed to unveil its new platform at the Society of Human Resource Managers conference in June 2000 - just a few short months away.

"Webworld helped us assess the available technology solutions on the market," said Intkhab Ali, chief technology officer for HR.com. "Originally, we looked at BroadVision and Vignette. But we found them to be difficult to implement and expensive. Since time-to-market was a crucial requirement, we choose the Allaire Business Platform."

Consisting of an integrated suite of software infrastructure products - application servers, packaged applications, and visual tools - the Macromedia Business Platform is a highly productive, open environment for creating robust e-business solutions.

HR.com's selection and implementation featured ColdFusion, Macromedia's application server for building and deploying scalable Web applications that integrate browser, server, and database. HR.com also licensed Macromedia Spectra, the company's flagship packaged application that leverages ColdFusion and provides a packaged system for content management, personalization, and online commerce.

Prototyping began in late January and by April 24, the site was ready for external use testing. "I come from a very traditional IT background," said Ali. "I have never seen an application of this magnitude and scope delivered in such a brief time period. ColdFusion looks very much like HTML so it was easy to learn and develop in - most of our people needed about three days of training. And the flexibility to move it to other databases or platforms is very helpful as we evolve."

Using Macromedia also enabled HR.com to embed third-party Macromedia components and applications, including a customizable storefront from AbleCommerce, an accounting system from SBT, a third party survey program and the Hierarchy Engine™ from webworld studios, inc. "All of this meant that we could create a very sophisticated site in a very short time period," said Ali. "Allaire has been amazing - far beyond my expectations."

The team of five full-time developers at webworld studios and five more at HR.com built a content-rich site that features thousands of documents, articles, and features. "The power and elegance of Macromedia Spectra really came through in the integration of webworld's Hierarchy Engine," explained Ali. "We can use it to logically collect, organize, manage, present, and maintain all of our thousands of pages of content. As we move more aggressively into our 'syndication' phase, Spectra will provide us not only with content management and personalization but also a valuable way to provide versioned content to our partner sites as well."

"Spectra's content management has been a key to the success of this site," said David Aden, vice president of technology services for webworld studios. "A page on the HR.com site can have lots of diverse content - articles, products, links, and more. Programming the pages was a lot easier because Spectra's object model takes care of all of the details."

Today, there are 150 content contributors throughout the country - freelancers and staff writers - who contribute to the HR.com library. Documents also pour in from nearly 50 trade journals and magazines with which HR.com has cross-licensing agreements. Those contributors use customized interfaces to add, modify and delete content.

"We've found the Spectra Webtop™ to be fundamentally sound in concept." said Ali. "But Spectra also gives you access to the functions on which the Webtop is built so you can create customized interfaces that control which users have access to which parts of the site. Our site is sufficiently feature rich that it was important for us to be able to customize the user and site administrator experience and put most - if not all - of the functionality they need only one click away."

"As we move to employ more syndication so that partner sites can also serve up HR.com content, Spectra's workflow processes will be very valuable. We're looking to let them log in, submit their articles, send them to editors to review and approve, and then publish them to the site. As the amount of content grows, and as our syndication agreements increase, we're talking about a lot more traffic and a lot more commerce," said Ali.