Brookfield Properties Audit Tool

Project Challenges

CURTIS Digital was engaged mid-August 2015, leaving less than 3 months to analyze the current digital solution before the proposed GO-LIVE date. An intensive weekly onsite quickly revealed the need for a custom, user-friendly middleware solution that Brookfield’s corporate authoring team could access to manage a variety of demographic information for both malls and their tenants, as well as author site content (like sales and events). The CURTIS Digital team would have to rapidly develop The Audit Tool in time for the early November release, and the software needed to be stable enough to withstand the Black Friday traffic surge to the mall websites (which had historically been brought down every year since Brookfield’s digital web presence began). As the original project was severely over-budget, the CURTIS Digital solution needed to be lean.

The Audit Tool Solution

Using the MEAN Stack, the CURTIS Digital development team quickly hit the ground running on developing an interface for manipulating data in Brookfield’s API. The management team had to quickly illicit informal requirements from a variety of stakeholders across the Brookfield organization and prioritize requests based on necessity for Go-Live. The short-time frame meant that the CURTIS Digital team was able to implement several unique solutions, including Amazon Lambda workers to schedule event and sales posts to the Brookfield API. The Audit Tool is a cloud-based, scale-able solution that runs on just two servers. 

Results

After a successful Black Friday without any website outages, The Audit Tool continues to be the only piece in the Brookfield solution that has never experienced down-time. The tool was initially released to a handful of Marketing Managers (~10 users), but that number has steadily grown to 300 users across several different internal and external teams.