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Cadillac Fairview Uses Image Manager for Retail Websites

The Client

Cadillac Fairview is one of North America's largest investors, owners and managers of commercial real estate. For more than 50 years, Cadillac Fairview has been leading the way in commercial real estate with innovative design, development and management. Cadillac Fairview focuses on high quality retail centres and office properties in Canada and the United States and also oversees equity investments in real estate companies and international investment funds. With a portfolio valued at approximately $15 billion, Cadillac Fairview and its affiliates own and manage 83 properties, including some of Canada's landmark developments such as the Toronto Eaton Centre. Cadillac Fairview is wholly-owned by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board, which invests to secure the retirement income of 264,000 active and retired teachers in Ontario.

The Envision IT Solution

Cadillac Fairview had over 50 production websites operating on different web content management (WCM) platforms, hosted by various 3rd party organizations. In order to simplify the external website environment, improve WCM functionality & security, leverage internal expertise & knowledge and substantially reduce operating costs, Cadillac Fairview engaged Envision IT to deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server  (MOSS) 2007 as the new standard WCM platform, create a standard website template and host the solution internally. Read more about this award-winning solution here.

Image Manager

One of the key components of the Cadillac Fairview Retail Sites solution was the implementation of the Envision IT Image Manager. With a host of content contributors to each mall site and the potential for thousands of tenant retailers posting store promotions and job postings, CF knew that image management would be a huge concern.  In the past images were often uploaded to the websites that were too large for optimum site performance or were distorted by inexperienced users.  Additionally finding the correct images in the context of each entry was a challenge.

The Envision IT Image Manager uses Silverlight to extend SharePoint publishing capabilities through a richer image management control for publishing sites.  Wired into the SharePoint search capabilities, this provides users an easy way to search and select images for use on the site.  The solution provides image management controls which automatically enforce image standards and scaling, resizing the images and preventing users from changing the aspect ratio of images.  Shadow copy images are displayed on web pages for optimum site performance, while original high resolution versions are maintained at source. Users can quickly upload images from their local folders, Bing and Google web searches, and can easily tell where in the site an image is used before making changes.