New Duke Realty Corporation Website— Providing Accurate Information On Demand
Location, Location, Location.
This mantra of real estate holds true for Duke Realty Corporation, which specializes in developing, building and acquiring office, industrial, retail and healthcare facilities across the country. An in-house leasing team works with commercial real estate brokers throughout the United States to fill those properties with tenants who require professional, productive work environments in premier locations. Yet the company had no one central location for brokers, prospects and employees to access marketing materials for available properties and space. Back in the “20th century,” the only way for brokers to access information about Duke’s properties and available space was to request information by telephone or e-mail. Then someone from Duke would, in turn, request the printed materials from the marketing department before sending hard copies to the broker. Eventually the system evolved to where the materials were printed and kept in each of Duke’s offices for distribution locally, but that information might be inaccurate or out-of-date. Once Duke’s intranet was established in 2000, those materials were posted there as PDFs and could be updated more frequently. In 2001, those materials were also posted as PDFs to Duke’s website through Duke SpaceFinder, the company’s search engine for available space. Yet the PDFs were still only as accurate as the most recent updating by the marketing department. Duke’s marketing and information technology (IT) departments began working together in 2004 to devise a solution to this challenge. The answer would literally come in a dream.
Dreamtime for Duke
The next re-design of Duke’s website was the perfect time to also update how brokers, prospects and employees accessed accurate, up-to-date information about available properties and spaces. The only way to ensure the information was updated in real-time was for that information to be generated dynamically. Rather than “re-invent the wheel,” Duke decided to use an existing application as the backbone of the improved Duke SpaceFinder. That application is Dream, Duke’s customer relationship management software. Dream stands for Duke Relationship Management system and was custom-built by Duke’s IT department. It serves as the central, internal location for all property, tenant and prospect data. The next step was to find the tools that would catalog and store images, connect the Dream database with the website and dynamically create HTML pages and PDFs. Duke’s IT department—specifically, the web team of Programmer Analyst Manager, Programmer Analyst and Business Systems Analyst—selected .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, and DynamicPDF™ Generator, a product of ceTe Software. The IT, marketing and leasing teams worked together closely over the following months to prepare for the launch of the improved website and Duke SpaceFinder. Existing property data was cleaned up, and all “parts” were entered into Dream, including building photos, master site plans, aerial photos, floor plans, bullet points, contacts and local office addresses. Templates were developed for search results, HTML pages and PDFs. This template system works like a mail-merge; it plugs in the appropriate parts from the database, and resizes images at the necessary resolution. Now the information on Duke SpaceFinder is updated in real time whenever a change is made in Dream. Duke’s leasing department is empowered to control their space listings with just a few mouse clicks, and are prompted when a decision is needed to list a property. The site upgrade was so successful, in fact, that Duke underestimated the volume of activity and the impact it would have on the database server. This was solved by building an internal system for tracking hits, trends and user errors, and by implementing a system by which the thumbnail images on the Duke SpaceFinder search results are cached, then updated every two hours. This speeds up the search function, yet still allows changes to all other parts to be posted immediately.
Real Estate Solutions. Infinite Possibilities.
The new site
provides a user-friendly search capability to commercial brokers who
are working with business leaders to identify real estate solutions.
The website meets the infinite needs of anyone seeking information
about Duke.
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