About
A company specialising in human resource management and employee assessment courses for medium and enterprise clients asked us to create a solution for them to protect their content when selling online.
When a customer purchased a course, all the course content, instructions, testing material and administrative documentation had to be printed in house and posted to the client. They wanted to reduce the costs to produce the printed material. And to improve efficiency in getting the course content to clients.
While the client had engaged an agency to build their new brand and website, the agency was unable to provide a solution to the IP Protect and Digital Rights Management. The client came to Devhaus for a solution.
Brief
Working with the agency and the client we had to develop a solution that would integrate with the Wordpress Ecommerce solution chosen by the agency to sell content to their clients.
The client had several hundred courses and each course had multiple documents to support the course work.
A customer would purchase a course for a set number of participants and would only be able to print material for that number. The solution would have to control the number of times the content could be printed and the number of views the customer could have of the course material. Once used up they would have to be prevented from accessing the content again.
The client wanted the flexibility to adjust the prints and views if the customer had issues or purchased more over the phone.
The customer could repurchase the content again in the future be able to access the content again.
Solution
Our team sat down with the client and agency and worked through the requirements for the project. We reviewed the shopping cart solution used by the agency and identified the technical scope for implementing the solution.
We identified several personas of the clients customers and concluded that the solution had to be technically easy for the customer to use. Some personas where working in large multinational corporations where internet access and installing external software is tightly controlled, getting new software installed was a difficult and time consuming process. The solution would have to take this into consideration and keep the technical barriers as low as possible.
We then investigated available solutions for Digital Rights Management (DRM) of content which also included the size and scope of work to implement a custom solution.
The customers preferred option was to deliver the content via PDF. We identified early in the process that DRM solutions where not technically possible for PDF documents.
We identified several existing solutions and ran tests on a shortlist of solutions. We critiqued based on ease of use for the client to transfer their existing content into the platform, ease of use for the client's customers to get access to the content, and finally ease of use for us to implement into the Wordpress website developed by the agency.
We proposed two solutions and the client decided on Lock Lizard Safeguard Enterprise solution.
We then documented workflows for the agency to implement the solution in the Wordpress application. We created software that would plug directly into Wordpress for integration between the E-Commerce platform and Lock Lizard.
We developed other software to allow the client automate the process of adding 1700+ PDF's to Lock Lizard Safeguard product, and integrated the data back into Wordpress.
Finally, we created end user customer documentation on the process from purchasing the content on the website to them printing out the course work from their own printers.
Results
The application launched and sales switched to the new process. The solution worked well for the client, their customers were brought through the new process.
Shortly after the launch of the website the clients agency disengaged from the project. We were asked to take over management and maintenance of the site. We were engaged with the client for a further 4 years, the client's business was subsequently purchased and the website merged back into the parent companies website.