Partners

Side-by-Side for Success: How Integration Partner Centralsoft Supports Livingdocs To Go Full Steam Ahead

Sarah Robins 

We’ve talked a lot about partnerships this year, from specific successes like the collaborations with iMatrics for CH Media and 200ok for blue, to how partnerships drive our overarching ethos moving into the future. Livingdocs wouldn’t be where it is today without the partners that help us in fulfilling our customers’ needs.

Our valued partners support us in a variety of ways, from those who help to integrate Livingdocs in our customers’ systems, to those who provide a product which complements our CMS to offer a broader spectrum of capabilities, to full-service partners who serve as fully symbiotic collaborators and resellers. Today, we are highlighting one of our longest-standing integration partners: customer-focused software solution provider Centralsoft and its CEO Dibran Isufi.

One of the things we value most about working with Centralsoft is the synergy between us: We share the same values and focus on providing top-notch customer service by remaining flexible and agile. Our relationship today is built on several years of trust and successful collaboration, and like side-by-side railway tracks leading to the same destination, our journeys have run in parallel. So how did our story begin?

Before Dibran founded the company Centralsoft, he was working as a professional freelancer for Livingdocs. Our relationship began in 2016 when we were looking for additional support for our first project with blue entertainment; our partners at 200ok introduced us to Dibran believing he would be a good fit with both the team and the technology. And they were right.

From day one, Dibran dove head first into Livingdocs, becoming deeply familiar with our core system. Despite being a freelancer working on ad hoc projects, Dibran was genuinely interested and involved, showing competence, commitment and adaptability. According to Dibran, there were many things about the culture at Livingdocs that resonated with him: “From the flat hierarchy, to the quality of work, to the fact that employee input is taken seriously, I saw that by working with Livingdocs, I was operating within a culture of respect where one is given the opportunity to get honest, supportive and forward-thinking feedback, allowing for growth potential both as a team and as an individual.”

It was clear from the start that the dynamic between Dibran and the Livingdocs team was a positive one, and what was originally supposed to be a one-off evolved into an ongoing relationship thanks to the seamlessness of our collaboration. As the work with blue entertainment became more multi-faceted, Dibran has continued to support us on the project as a trusted colleague; still today, Centralsoft is responsible for the development of the entire blue platform – blue news, blue TV and other blue projects – including, amongst many other things, integrating a new commenting system.

Thanks to Dibran’s excellent work, it was clear that we wanted to take this partnership to future destinations on our ever-evolving roadmap. Over the course of six years, we strengthened our partnership with Dibran and later his company Centralsoft, creating new pathways for mutual success as our portfolio of customers continued to expand. Two projects of note were those with Berliner Zeitung and later with Aschendorff Medien.

The project with Berliner Zeitung began in 2019 as a rapid roll-out where we needed to provide a working Livingdocs solution in record time without getting derailed. Where did Centralsoft come in? Thanks to Dibran’s unique understanding of the Livingdocs product, Centralsoft helped us go full steam ahead with the roll-out, supporting the implementation and integration of the most fundamental parts of our solution, including page and article management, automatic lists and other essential publishing features. The progress we made with Centralsoft here paved the way for our full-service partner Netcetera to join the journey and provide additional support in this project.

In the case of Aschendorff, Centralsoft played a key role in providing support implementing the core product, as well as on a deeper level finding the right extensions and bridging the gaps between established tracks to create custom solutions and achieve the best possible result.

What does our partnership look like today? One of the major projects we are currently working on with Centralsoft is with Seven.One Entertainment Group. As Seven.One decided to embark upon going into more elaborated news publishing, they looked to Livingdocs as their CMS to support this transition. Where is Centralsoft in this picture? Not only are they helping to consolidate the content structure to make it more user friendly, but they are also responsible for integrating the video and image system.

Indeed, the focal point of Centralsoft’s involvement here lies mainly in multimedia related activity, particularly the custom video search integration: the user experience in the Livingdocs CMS is being optimised to find external videos content more easily as well as to provide internal video search capability within the system complete with relevant filters (in this case, according to television show and media brand) so that videos don’t have to be imported redundantly, thereby creating a more seamless and clear creation experience.

Another focus of Centralsoft’s support in the Seven.One Entertainment Group project is creating the capability to manage television program content or add new shows on the website directly from the newsroom, i.e. the process no longer requires consulting a software engineer. This makes for a more simple and intuitive user experience, one that is as accessible for journalists in the newsroom as it is for developers.

Moreover, Centralsoft is working on a variety of features and enhancements, including multi-language tools, location-specific routing and website design improvements, as well as making a more frictionless connection between the back end and the front end, strengthening the link between the data and the landing pages. Creating a sustainable solution for multi-location delivery has proven to be a particularly custom and complex task to accomplish, but one that has paved the way for being able to integrate this capability in future projects.

What does our journey look like moving forward as we continue to lay down new tracks? Let’s see what Dibran had to say:

Thanks to their deep understanding of our product and its development over the years, the team at Centralsoft is able to take a bird’s eye view and find sustainable solutions by seeing the tracks we’ve made and creating new links between them. The core Livingdocs team intrinsically sees things from a “product perspective” in that the core product needs to work for every customer; we feel having the customer-specific perspective from Centralsoft results in the best outcomes for our customers.

Further, as we know that life is full of surprises both good and bad, we recognize that, as we continue to develop our product, there is always a chance that something breaks. So we want to proactively ensure that we have the best support and “fail safe measures” to make sure we have the best support in place so we can respond quickly and effectively in the event of an unforeseen issue. Centralsoft has proven to be an excellent partner in both this preparedness and responsiveness.

When we link up with Centralsoft, customers can be confident that, together with Dibran’s team, Livingdocs will get them to their desired destination without unnecessary delay.

Want to learn more about our partnership program? Dive into the details.