Soundview We helped Soundview continue supporting its legacy content management system while partnering long-term to build an entirely new version of it.Provided ServicesWeb DevelopmentQuality AssuranceSupport BACKGROUND & OPPORTUNITY Flexibility to Adapt Soundview distills business books into easily digestible eight-page text and 20-minute audio summaries. For over 40 years, they’ve helped save people time and money by drawing out the key, actionable takeaways from books that can otherwise be difficult to understand. Originally a magazine, Soundview launched its first website in the mid-nineties and is now exclusively online. The current iteration of Soundview’s website runs on a custom .NET content management system developed by a different software vendor. A couple of years ago, that vendor informed Soundview that it would no longer support that custom CMS. That news left Soundview with two choices. They could either spend the money on a complete rebuild of their site or find a different partner who could manage and support the complex custom CMS. "Soundview’s internal technical team is fairly small. But we've really enjoyed the flexibility of outsourcing work because it gives us a broader range of capabilities. Our initial engagement with MentorMate was minimal, but we were blown away by the team’s expertise." David Getz Director of Web Operations SOLUTION & PROCESS Continuing Support for a Legacy System Rather than unexpectedly rebuild its entire website, Soundview partnered with MentorMate’s continuation engineering team to support its existing site. To start, we mined through Soundview’s codebase and documentation before moving on to addressing some immediate backlog tasks to see if our team was a good fit. Over the next six months, we delivered on that flexibility that the Soundview team was seeking. We worked through backlog tasks during that time, and from there, Soundview was able to plan on future engagements for our team. "One of the biggest concerns people have about offshore teams is communication, both in terms of language and time zone differences. On both of those fronts, MentorMate exceeded our expectations. Communication has been very consistent throughout our entire partnership." David Getz Director of Web Operations IMPACT & WHAT'S NEXT A Rebuilt Site on Soundview's Terms The short-term impact of our work with the team at Soundview meant saving them from having to scramble to rebuild their website. That was particularly impactful because of the short notice that Soundview’s previous vendor gave about no longer supporting the infrastructure. In partnering with MentorMate, Soundview was able to prioritize and clear a massive backlog of tasks in a timely manner. The long-term impact of our partnership is that Soundview now has a technology partner that understands their business, their infrastructure, and their needs. All of that knowledge and background context are extremely valuable as we embark on the next phase of our partnership: rebuilding Soundview’s website. "Partnering with MentorMate bought us some time in supporting our existing infrastructure for another couple of years so that we could rebuild our site on our terms. Since we already have a strong relationship, we chose MentorMate to build the next version of our website." David Getz Director of Web Operations