HEC Montréal Chooses Percussion's Rhythmyx ECM to Manage its Growing Multilingual Web Presence

WOBURN, MA - June 27, 2005 - Percussion Software, a leading developer of practical software solutions enabling customers to maximize the value and quality of enterprise content, today announced that HEC Montréal, one of Canada's leading business schools, has selected its Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system to manage the growing volume of content for its public Web site serving students, faculty, staff, alumni, and prospective students. By moving to the Rhythmyx content management system (CMS), HEC Montréal will achieve its long-term goal of putting more emphasis on the needs of prospective students and using its public Web site as more of a student recruitment tool.

HEC Montréal's Web presence is very large scale and growing daily. Traffic on HEC Montréal's public Web site routinely approaches 1 million visitors per month. There is one public Web site and about 70 sub-sites managed with Rhythmyx. Eventually plans call for an extra 250 individual faculty Web sites as well. The number of content contributors using Rhythmyx is expected to grow fairly rapidly, starting from an initial 40 content authors, and moving on to a second phase that will be add about 50 more and a third phase, during which the 250 faculty content contributors will be added – for a total of 340 content authors. Currently, the public Web site contains some 40,000 pages of Web content, and this number, too, is expected to grow quickly.

"Our main goal in selecting the Rhythmyx ECM solution was to better manage the increasing volume, complexity and multilingual requirements of our Web content," said Kathleen Grant, Director of Communications and Student Recruitment at HEC Montréal. "In the next few years, we expect our Web page volume to scale from 40,000 to 60,000 or 70,000 pages or more. In addition, the complexity of our content management is increasing, not only because of higher volume, but also because the number of end users and content authors is growing. We also appreciate the fact that Rhythmyx makes it easy to maintain French, English and Spanish versions of our pages – which is becoming a requirement for a growing percentage of our content."

"We have a large number of content contributors, so we like the way Rhythmyx supports a large number of communities representing groupings of authors," added Grant. "Most of our content contributors are native French speakers, so Rhythmyx's support for a French version of its Content Explorer interface for content contributing and editing is really useful."

In addition to product features, HEC Montréal also cited the qualities of Percussion as a company as further reasons for choosing Rhythmyx. "We were impressed by the level of commitment we saw in Percussion," commented Grant. "With Percussion, there was a willingness to work with us, and to be available and a curiosity about what we do that made us realize we had chosen the right ECM vendor."

About HEC Montréal

Founded in 1907, HEC Montréal was Canada's first management school. It was the first North American school to hold the three accreditations AACSB International, EQUIS and AMBA, and the first non-European school to receive EQUIS accreditation. HEC Montréal's MBA program is accredited by the Association of MBAs (UK), offered in English and French, with over 55 percent international students. It was rated as one of the 10 best MBA programs outside the United States, according to the MBA 2004 classification by BusinessWeek. Close to 12,000 students, of whom 2,800 are non-Canadian visa students and permanent residents, make up the total enrollment. With a multidisciplinary faculty of nearly 240 career professors, HEC Montréal offers 33 management study programs, from BBA to PhD. It features a multilingual approach, with some courses offered in English and Spanish in addition to the French curriculum, as well as French workshops and courses in business English and business Spanish.

HEC Montréal hosts Canada's largest and most prestigious international exchange program, involving partnerships with 66 universities and major management schools in 26 countries. It maintains an active presence in over 40 countries, and through its International Projects the school exerts its international leadership. HEC Montréal was among the first Canadian universities to integrate technology into the classroom. The home of one of the world's foremost bilingual business libraries, HEC Montréal is renowned for its extensive electronic holdings, including one of the best-equipped trading rooms of any university, updated with real-time financial data by the Bloomberg, E-Signal and Reuters agencies. A highly efficient Career Center provides an interactive job search tool giving companies around the world access to HEC Montréal graduates. The school has established numerous partnerships with business and houses more than 50 research chairs, centers and groups.