Press Release

The Institute of Cancer Research, Europe’s leading cancer research centre, has partnered with Percussion Software to improve the delivery of its website content to a wide variety of audiences, including the international research community, potential staff, people affected by cancer, medical practitioners, students and charity supporters. Percussion’s Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution will enable users across the whole of The Institute to contribute directly to the website without having to involve IT. The partnership with Percussion is part of a refresh of the www.icr.ac.uk website which is officially launched today (10 March 2006).

The Institute of Cancer Research is one of the world’s leading cancer research organisations and is internationally renowned for the quality of its science. Its mission is the relief of human suffering by pursuing excellence in the fight against cancer.

Joe McFadden, IT Strategy Director, The Institute of Cancer Research: "We have a fairly complex website for an organisation of our size and we needed a solution that was flexible and powerful enough to deliver the right content to the right audience. As a small team we were concerned about the time and potential business disruption in moving to the new system but 1500 web pages were migrated into Rhythmyx with ease."

A robust enterprise content management solution, Rhythmyx manages web content, documents, digital assets, portal content and scanned images. The solution offers rich functionality out-of-the-box, (allowing customisation to be focused on meeting specific needs) and easy on-going administration by technical staff. By delivering a range of pre-built application functionality through Rhythmyx FastForward for Web Content Management (WCM), Rhythmyx allows organisations to implement the functionality they need today, whilst ensuring that they can meet tomorrow's needs with an extensible, standards-based architecture.

Rhythmyx has enabled the internal IT department to take a step back and to allow the scientists and business users within the organisation the ability to update and manage their own content. This removes the burden of uploading content to the website from the internal IT department.

From the outset of the selection process, McFadden was impressed by Percussion’s commitment to understanding the Institute’s requirements. "Their work with similar higher learning organisations such as The British Library and Nottingham Trent University which serve a wide diversity of audiences has given Percussion a great understanding of the way in which we operate and what we needed. The next phase of our project will be to begin to incorporate Rhythmyx into the build of a new intranet site."

Joseph Wykes, managing director European operations, Percussion Software adds: "Academic bodies and institutions are continuously looking for areas of improvement to their day to day operations. Rhythmyx delivers improved efficiencies from day one by freeing up the internal IT department from content management worries by empowering users within the wider organisation to generate and manage content for online consumption."