Canadian Association of Optometrists

CAO is the professional association that represents Doctors of Optometry in Canada. It is also the national federation of ten provincial associations of optometrists and represents over 4,000 members across Canada.

Project Highlights

The association was looking to revamp its membership website, and provide a long term, scalable portal solution which was Open-Source CMS based. It, like many other… had integrated first generation CMS from small providers, which was not scalable, unsupported and met its life expectancy.

We consulted a review of options and did a full discovery of the requirements to aid in building a strategic web direction. Our Input was professionally review by a 3rd party, and was found very favourable.

We proceeded to design in traditional mock-up, once approved… we built a CSS Skin for the site. The client reviewed content, and cleansed older information. We integrated Plone 2.5 with an ISP, and deployed the portal internally… where CAO staff where trained to author and manage content.

Once all the revised data was ready, Vurtur exported old user accounts, and imported them into the new platform. CAO deployed an mail Invitation card to access the new website (many old user accounts were incomplete, email update was not an option). The deployment went flawlessly, and hits dramatically increase over the next months.

CAO also has a custom Classified and Job Posting area, several monthly email newsletters, and uses Polls regularly. (they have also done electronic surveys and Donations, among other add-on technology projects.

The platform also includes a powerful “Sectioned Content” workflow. This allows for Provinces to publish their own content themselves, and is only available to their respective Provincial members. Provincial admins can only author in their respective sections… and Committees use a very similar sectioned area.

Fallout Projects

We have recently deployed the CAO-MRMS (Membership Relationship Management System), which is fully automated with the portal. All accounts are updated by either members online, or by CAO staff by simply managing this CRM.

In one simple member record entry, our workflow will auto generate a membership ID, use a sophisticated algorithm to generate a unique Username, and send new members tailored welcome emails (different for Students VS ODs and respective of preferred language).

Member can access their accounts with a link from their email (validating their email address), and set their initial password, and have instant access to all their respective Portal content and features.

The “Find and Opto” is now generated in Real-Time from this MRMS CRM platform, as mentioned in section 3.1.2.

The data is new in a true relational database format (locations are unique!) Accounts and references to work locations can be set by members from their Single Sign-on, they can update the profile.

In-progress

We are now in the process of upgrading to Plone 3, and merging the public website with the Members portal. Pending many fun discussions and debates. :)