Fulham FC - Case Study

The Summary

When Matthew McGrory, the IT director of Fulham Football Club, gained board backing to develop the Club’s CRM strategy, re-developing the website was always going to be an important factor if the Club were going to succeed in their long-term goal of bringing the club closer to its fans.

“The long-term vision is to have one view of the customer to facilitate the best fan experience….Eighty-three per cent of our fans have internet access,which is the highest in the Premiership so we need to focus on these people.” In order to deliver this vision, the Club website needed a fresh new design and a tightly integrated suite of new online applications. These included an online ticketing system, a web-shop, a mobile service and an external news feed which provided public website visitors with a running commentary.

The Challenge

 At the end of the 2005/6 season, the Club’s website was maintained by a mixture of in-house resources and outsourced design and development agencies.

As a result of this approach, the look and feel of the site had become inconsistent and the system in general was outdated and incapable of easily integrating with the other applications such as the Club’s customer database.

There were some 7.000 pages of content held in disparate systems that needed to be migrated. Due to the nature of the incumbent system these pages were largely inaccessible and could not meet the needs of a diverse audience.

If the objectives for the website strategy were to be achieved, the Club needed a system that allowed the Club’s web team to rapidly respond to seasonal demand fluctuations and reflect changes in product and services offerings. This also meant that the CMS was fully separated from the look and feel of the site and enabled Club staff to be able to make rapid site-wide changes when necessary.

Finally, the new website and additional online applications needed to be fully integrated and live in time for the new season.

The Solution

 After a rigorous tender process including stiff competition from established suppliers to the sports market, Contensis was awarded the project.

One of the key factors in choosing Contensis was its .NET framework and open API which enabled it to easily integrate with virtually any application. This was critical if Fulham were going to meet their deadline of the opening game of the new season on August 20th.

It is worth noting that one of the most common factors of web development projects running into difficulties is the number of suppliers involved in the project; particularly when combined with very tight time frames. Yet despite no lead contractor being involved, Genetics managed to maintain a close working relationship with all the suppliers and ensured that the Fulham website was delivered in time for the new season as planned.

The Benefits

Fulham FC now has one of the most advanced websites in the UK sports industry:

• Membership profile & Single-Sign-on to fully integrated online applications: Fans can access all the Club’s web applications with just one user id.
• Live, minute by minute match updates: Fans can follow the game with live match feeds.
• Simplified management of complex data for Club staff: The new web infrastructure enables Club staff to maintain a far greater level of control than was previously available. By using intuitive tools, staff can quickly and easily update site content and where necessary; respond to sudden fluctuations in seasonal demand.

Technical Detail

The project commenced in mid-July with Nataliya Lukyanova the Club Internet Manager hosting a meeting between all of the suppliers. A project schedule was agreed and the Contensis professional services team were chosen to lead and manage the integration process in order to ensure that the functionality of the disparate systems would be maximised and seamlessly embedded in the overall solution.

 PA Sports – Minute by minute match updates

For the new website Fulham wanted to provide minute by minute updates for their fans during any of their Premiership games. As a part of this functionality, there was also to be a full set of statistics for the entire match and individual players. To facilitate this Fulham engaged with PA Sports who provided an XML feed delivered by FTP every few seconds during a game.

The challenge of this part of the project was to provide a method of interpreting this data in real time, displaying the results of the feed in real time to the fans that are refreshing the web pages every few seconds and then storing the data so it can be referred to at any point in the future.

The solution our team designed was a fully managed set of .NET classes which wrapped up all the XML data provided. As new data is added the entire match collection is binary serialised to a file which is then automatically picked up and loaded by the .NET web application (Contensis). In effect we created a mini specialised managed database in memory for querying and interpreting the raw data.

The web application utilises .NET web controls to interact with the customised data file, which is deserialised from disk in less than 200 milliseconds. Utilising this methodology ensures that the users are viewing the latest data from the match less that 1.5 seconds after data transmission.  There were nearly 100 complex .NET classes to write, including a full set of web controls and a bespoke file watcher that had to be written due to limitations found in the standard .NET implementations.

This part of the project was quickly developed over a five day period by breaking the project into manageable parts, enabling four developers to work simultaneously.

Single Sign On

It was decided that within the new Fulham website architecture there should be an integrated single-sign-on process between the various web applications (online ticketing, web-shop, main website etc.). With this in mind, Contensis was chosen as the security provider for the entire registration/log-on and single-sign-on process.

All of the main parts of the implementation process utilised standard Contensis web controls but in addition some new web controls were created through inheritance from the same Contensis controls. These new controls allowed Contensis to pull the latest information on a particular user from the central ticketing system, whilst still employing the standard Contensis functionality.

This was important because a users profile could be updated, for example; when a user ‘changed’ their profile information by purchasing tickets through a ticket outlet or over the phone. The key factor here is that the standard Contensis controls supported a whole set of events to allow .NET developers to customise the sign-in process in any way desired. In this case we handled the AfterValidated event to check the user information with the ticketing system provided by Galathea.

Galathea Online Ticketing System

We provided Galathea with our standard single-sign-on documentation which enabled them to update their systems with the appropriate information to log-in users automatically. The single-sign-on process utilises web services, which ensures that applications on any platform can be integrated with Contensis authentication very easily. The actual web service integration for the ticketing provider was up and running in under 30 minutes. (The only issues that remained centred around network connectivity for testing due to firewalls and server configuration.)

X-Cart Web Shop

With the web-shop application supplied by X-Cart, there was no specific resource available to implement our web services methodology. Our professional services team therefore decided to utilise X-Cart’s authentication mechanisms. These were implemented utilising an encoded cookie which is set at log-on. This cookie was set in the AfterValidated event of the log-on process. The only minor issue with this methodology was the need to implement an encryption mechanism that was supported by both PHP and .NET, but this was straightforward.

Touchline Feeds

For general league information and information on Fulham players such as their appearances and goals etc, a feed from Touchline was provided. This feed was implemented utilising XML provided through standard URLs. In much the same way as integrating with the PA Sports application, this data is interpreted into a set of business classes and then displayed to the end user utilising bespoke .NETweb controls.

Content Migration

As part of the project it was important to import the club’s news articles from their former CMS. In total there were some 7000 +news articles stored in a SQL Server database. These were imported utilising our standard interactive database import tools which allows data to be quite literally dragged and dropped as required into Contensis, mapping the information to the relevant structure, placeholders and meta data.