CASE STUDY

ICF Uses SearchStax managed search
to Drive Better Search on Sitecore

If we were to set up a Solr environment from scratch, you’re talking dozens of hours at least, let alone the ongoing maintenance and monitoring. This added up to a significant amount of time savings, which we were able to pass on to our client.​

Jason Perry, CEO
Engagency

About

ICF is a global consulting and digital services provider with more than 7,000 professionals spread across more than 70 countries focused on making big things possible for their clients.

Situation

ICF needed to upgrade their website to better serve their customers. In addition, their old website relied on Apache Lucene for site search, and they wanted to make the switch to Apache Solr to leverage the advanced capabilities of Solr to further the marketing team’s goal to scale up content creation and distribution.

Content marketing is used extensively by ICF to reach and educate their customers. They share reports, blogs, whitepapers, and other informational content on their website, along with press releases, event information, and more. To say their website is rich with content would be an understatement.

Uploading new content to their old website meant not only creating and publishing that content, but also tagging it with the appropriate industry, topic, and location verticals. In an arduous and inefficient process, the team had to manually add each piece of content to each area of the site they wanted it to appear, which sometimes totaled in the dozens.

Solution

ICF needed to drastically upgrade their search functionality, and required a forward-looking site design to match. ICF selected two Austin, Texas-based firms for their project — Slide UX to design the various search experiences, and Engagency to serve as the Sitecore development partner.

Engagency completed a Sitecore upgrade and used SearchStax Managed Search service to set up and manage their Solr infrastructure. Leveraging Slide UX’s designs, Engagency then architected and implemented various search experiences that were interactive, cutting-edge, and personalized for each visitor. 

Results

The search capabilities of Solr, provided by SearchStax Managed Search, exceeded expectations in terms of efficiency, functionality, and performance.

The ICF team has been able to significantly scale up their content creation, and the search capabilities largely contributed to that. With SearchStax, they can quickly and dynamically pull in content across their site, whereas before it would have been a manual and painstaking process.

Read the ICF case study blog post that provides more details on this project.

Product

Managed Search

Platform

Sitecore

Location

North America

Industry

Technology