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UWE, seduced by Plone

The Walloon Business Federation, UWE (Union Wallonne des Entreprises), migrated its main website and federates to Plone.

A CMS for uwe.be

UWE - Union Wallonne des Entreprises is the Walloon federation of business leaders and employers. It was founded in 1967 with the mission to promote and coordinate the enterprises acting in the Walloon region (Belgium).

UWE established its presence on the web since 1995 with the uwe.be site: born as a simple site it grew up as leading site in the business information, hundreds of daily visits and an active editorial staff.

UWE had to find a way to manage resources better than the static site and started to design the evolution toward a CMS in late 2007: the major needs were to ease the process of creating and spreading information and to offer the best service to a dynamic audience.

The Choice: seduced by Plone

"We were looking for a technical solution to be affordable and able to meet our specific requirements" - says Vincent Reuter, chairman of UWE.be - "We analyzed several solutions on the market and we were finally seduced by the open source platform Plone".

Plone is currently used in Belgium by many institutions, from universities to communes, to ministries to the Wallon Government itself. UWE adopted Plone for its main site, uwe.be, for the new extranet and also for the CMS evolution of the federate site ncpwallonie.be

The Portal

The new portal is leveraging the image o UWE on the web: the graphical aspect is professional and pleasant and it plays a significant role in the usability of the site.

Plone provides all users with advanced search function, which are furtherly customized to match the architecture of the site; RSS aggregation is available for all main themes and special tools allow interaction with the federates sites.

The high level integration work involved specific views and content types to manage the UWE Bases de données, which are special databases of business resources; they provide a huge amount of knowledge for operators, including directories of certified companies, press contacts, job offers.

The site has multimedia capabilities, from video to photos; it features reserved areas with further documentation and a newsletter service for the associates

UWE ZEA Team

The Team

Uwe.be is the result of companies working together, with the coordination of the business network ZEA Partners: editorial management and webmastering was made by Thierry Decloux of UWE; development and deployment was provided by Reflab; training courses are held by the belgian company Affinitic and graphic design was made by Perfect.