The European aircraft manufacturer Airbus has chosen to use CHILI Publisher as part of their delivery of brand consistent marketing. At SPICYtalks 19 in Berlin Digital Project Manager Thomas Julé from Airbus gave a quite impressive presentation of what they are doing. It was also very nice to experience the openness of Airbus and how they show the application.

Great design, great implementation, and here you can hear and see for yourself some of the motivations for working with CHILI.

I am a developer at Art after that I work in several company, communication agency for more than 15 years. And now I’m [inaudible 00:00:21] a consultant, independent consultant and I’m working on project, a digital project with Airbus. With my latest project is the integration of the Chili Publish engine inside the website called the Brand Portal. And when you can go to a specific place, inside this website called the production room. And when you are inside the production room you can create document like poster, flyer, card and all the other thing. One other thing, we work on this project for one year now. And the project took time to create it, to work but we are confident now and we are in release since last September.

The brand portal actually is public. You can access it through brand.airbus.com, but the production one is only dedicated to Airbus employee and subcontractor who have an ID. Airbus ID. You have to connect with a single sign on and when you are on it, you can create your digital product. By respecting the brand guideline, it’s very easy to use because we prepare some constraint inside the Chili Publish. When you just have to put on the site your content, then select a few option, select color, block position, images from the dam, for example, and then you can send it automatically to print by clicking the print button and the inside Airbus print shop will print the document.

The public place doesn’t use the Chili engine, it’s just a library when you have all the guideline accessible and the private part is only for people in Airbus. So you have to have an account to use it. Actually we use two different technology. For the public part, we use Adobe Experience Manager and for the private part, we use a PHP framework called Symphony. And we integrated the two environment to make it work seamlessly between the other. And we also have two Chili environment installed, one for the brand and one for the multi-media studio. The multi-media studio is using more smart template but around project, it’s user restricted, for a few user. If you have a specific need, because every year you are doing the same brochure or you are doing the same flyer and you want to have it more quickly with less cost.

You can ask the multi-media studio to create for you a specific smart template and you will have it inside the specific place, inside the multi-media web application. Oh actually, I know Chili Publish since 2014. And I know the solution first because it was based on Flash and on Flex and previous solution used by Airbus was solution using Java. Old solution but very…good solution at this time. And what we wanted when we do some benchmarking is to have a solution is working in HTML5 because we didn’t want to have people in Airbus installing content, installing a specific software to use this solution.

It was one of the main criteria and after that we wanted to have a solution, enough open to be used inside a developer tool. We love and we use every day and when we look at the API of Chili, we say that it was a solution open for the developer world. So it was great. We use the Chili to integrate it with the API because Symphony’s using the API to call templates, to call, to generate the documents, to generate something to print. But we also use [inaudible 00:04:42] services to connect. For example, the Chili service to a dam, [inaudible 00:04:51] dam. We are, we were in closed beta before the summer, open beta in the summer and now we are live. But actually we were, we are the most valuable product in Fremont. So last December for Christmas, yes, we deliver our first version of the portal, but it took more time to create all the smart template and to understand all the smart template will be made and all the workspace to have the user use it with ease and not have a big workspace with all the option and everything.

The reaction was great. Actually Airbus is celebrating the 50 anniversary this year, and we add the templates to create an avatar with your picture and the mask of the 50 years. So it was great, and it was a digital template. You will not be able to print it, but a digital template to promote the production room. And we are okay with that. Actually we have two environment. One more easy to use for the brand, one more advanced. And we think we can do another one for specific project. Maybe in the future.

I hope we will continue to use Chili Publish inside the Airbus for several year and to continue to do that, we have to create more template, open the possibility to external company, external designer to create their own template and propose it. That’s why we, we are having staging under one month with environment critic for external agency so they can create product, experiment the use with Chili and send us the package when we can put it in production. So I think there is a lot of thing to attend and to see with Chili. The possibility to have a module to open to a content management system. For example, if you want to add the Chili to WordPress with a small module or have the possibility to write directly inside Chili the action, or work on the documents. Also do general variable to other project and that’s what we want to do with our advanced integration now of Chili.

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