Introducing the NEW EMC.com

I've been all consumed for the past 16 or so months building a new corporate site for EMC . I'm happy to say we launched the new site over the weekend and my life can now resume to some state of normalcy.

To call it a new site doesn't do this baby justice, tho. It's a complete retool of who EMC is. Following a couple of years of aggressive acquisition activity, our web presence was, well... disparate. Our product offering has grown dramatically and we've entered new market segments. The new .COM brings together what was three independent sites - Now presenting a unified view into the EMC of today.

So much more than consolidating sites...

With each distinct sites comes a distinct tone of voice. Simply pulling all of this content together just wouldn't cut it. The team had to completely revamp the tone and messaging across thousands of assets to deliver a consistent experience for our audience. We also had to ensure everything was written for an online audience. No more ten paragraph intros... Everything was reviewed / rewritten to ensure the point was delivered quickly and effectively for the web. As you can imagine, this effort required tight collaboration across virtually the entire company.

Es un sitio globa (It's a global site)

The new .COM is available in 24 languages and over 50 locales. Every time I'm involved in such a project, I renew my respect for the complexities of localization and globalization. Having such a geographically dispersed team was a major key to our success.

Wow - Cool technology

The site is built largely on EMC technology... It's one of the perks of tackling such an effort at a high tech company... It's like having free reign in a candy store.  VMWare reduces the number of physical servers, saves data center footprint and provides significant energy savings. Documentum manages the content management layer - enabling B2B workflow on a global scale, automated versioning / expiration, a common enterprise data object model, distributed publishing, and more. As you'd expect, the storage side of the house is made up of CLARiiON, Symmetrix and Celerra products - all enablng ILM best practices. On the management side, SRDF,  NetWorker, TimeFinder and EMC Disk Library are busy protecting & managing the data.

Cool Webby Stuff

We've implemented a lot of really cool Flash on the new site... You'll also see emphasis on rich media, blogging, podcasting, discussions, etc;. Frankly, this is but a drop in the bucket... It's odd to look at the launch of such a site as 'the beginning' - But it is. We have big plans for the year ahead and this is but a first step in the evolution.

It's all about the users

Probably the most important on the list. You may think it's a no brainer - but on many web sites I come across, it's not. Our focus since day one has been on our audience. Every decision... Every navigation element... Every word selection - Has been with our audience in mind. We ran focus and user groups early on and mid stream. We surveyed our users to ensure we knew what THEY wanted from a .COM site. We shared prototypes and mock ups with the audience all along the way to ensure we were satisfying their needs.. Not ours.

I could go on... And will likely deep dive on some of these areas in coming posts. For now, it's nice to reflect on the activity of the past year and the incredible team that made it happen. Personally, I'm looking forward to stepping back, catching my breath and refocusing myself for the new year. Opportunities are abound.

Nice to be back in the blogosphere. Check out the new EMC.com and let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Len

Comments

[Storagezilla]

Nice job. :)

[John Wall]

Congrats, that's very cool. I really like the drop down navigation - access to a ton of info, yet still very clean.

[Kraemer]

Congrats, Len! As a new EMC citizen, I'm looking forward to being part of that contributing audience. Great work!

[Alex]

So great!

[Josh Maher]

A late congrats to you!! The site is a great improvement :)

On to the internal sites?