We needed a CMS solution that would be able to support our specific integration needs, and one that could integrate information from our member management system to create an even better experience for our audiences.
Legacy systems oftentimes can’t adapt to meet today’s fast-paced environment – where speed and flexibility are just as important as quality. The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), a technical professional society, partnered with Brightspot, the leading CMS, to combat this exact challenge. Together with Brightspot, SPE migrated five existing SPE magazine brands—Journal of Petroleum Technology, HSE Now, Data Science and Digital Engineering, The Way Ahead, and Oil and Gas Facilities—creating a simplified, flexible content management solution (CMS) in under four months.
“We needed a CMS solution that would be able to support our specific integration needs, and one that could integrate information from our member management system to create an even better experience for our audiences.”
With more than 140,000 members in 144 countries, SPE manages industry resources, and publishes magazines, books and peer-reviewed journals that serve managers, engineers and scientists in the upstream segment of the oil and gas industry. The society’s legacy CMS was inefficient, inflexible and unstable, preventing publishing teams from working independently from the IT department as needed, taking up valuable resources and time on both sides.
“Our society caters to technical audiences with unique interests and needs across the globe,” said Glenda Smith, Vice President of Communications, SPE. “We needed a CMS solution that would be able to support our specific integration needs, and one that could integrate information from our member management system to create an even better experience for our audiences.”
Designed by publishers and developers with an extensible architecture, Brightspot provided SPE a new front end using an out-of-the-box Brightspot theme adapted to SPE branding guidelines to ensure the multiple magazines could control their own brand identities. This also simplified article creation for authors by allowing publishing teams to work independently with streamlined workflows and publishing features, and it now provides flexibility within the sites to customize the look and feel of each page to more easily cater to SPE’s audiences.
Various features within the Brightspot solution improved integrations for SPE including:
- MathJax integration now allows equations and mathematical notations to be easily inputted into a rich text editor
- Integrations with SPE’s single sign on allows Brightspot to use member disciplines as a way to show personalized content to members and authenticated users
- Tag suggestions using AWS Comprehend and i2K Connect auto-suggests technical tags for content classification
“Our partnership with SPE exemplifies how Brightspot supports and understands membership models for media organizations with unique needs, including professional societies and associations,” said Sandeep Hulsandra, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Brightspot. “In under four months, SPE now has the ability to manage all their content from a unified system, which is important—if not essential—for organizations today that need to successfully manage multiple brands.”
About Society of Petroleum Engineers
SPE has more than 140,000 members in 144 countries participating in 204 sections and 411 student chapters. SPE’s membership includes petroleum engineers, scientists, researchers, safety managers and related professionals, and more than 65,000 student members. SPE maintains offices in Dallas, London, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Calgary, Moscow and Houston.
About Brightspot
At Brightspot we believe technology should enable content-focused teams to work smarter, faster, and more seamlessly to move businesses forward.
With decades of collective experience in publishing and media, we’ve built a powerful CMS and world-class Delivery Team to help companies transform their business content and digital experiences by creating enterprise applications at scale with astonishing speed.
