The European Parliament

Streamline servers and deliver a better and more cohesive customer experience

The European Parliament started working with Jahia in 2004. In 2016, we needed to streamline our numerous servers to Jahia, along with multiple projects and various visual designs accumulated over the years. This was to encourage the reuse of developments and templates and to facilitate the exchange of information between the various sites. As a result of that streamlining effort, in 2019 the Parliament has more sites, but fewer servers.

– Christophe Debauche, CMS Specialist at Atos Luxembourg PSF and Jahia Project Manager at the European Parliament

The European Parliament (EP) is the parliamentary body of the European Union (EU), elected through direct universal suffrage. It shares the legislative power of the European Union with the Council of the European Union. The EP counts among its number 28 member states, with 751 MPs representing 513 million citizens that speak 24 official languages. The European Parliament is a longstanding client of Jahia’s, dating back to 2004.

Objectives

In 2004, the European Parliament used version 4 of Jahia’s CMS, which supported many of the
Parliament’s websites. By 2016, 80 Jahia projects were in production on the platform.
The Parliament wanted to strengthen its capacity to exchange information between its sites and, in particular, to aggregate news items published on the various sites of the Directorates-General.

Additionally, there was a significant need for personalization on the European Parliament’s intranet. The hope was to be able to browse with a variety of user profiles (MEPs, assistants, external staff or members of other institutions, etc.).

“We needed to be able to access the site’s information through a range of profiles in order to provide a more relevant navigation for everyone...such as their calendar, favorite applications, bookmarks to be notified when a page is updated, and so on.”

30,000

visits per day

90

full-time editors

21

languages

Solutions

As a result of this extensive streamlining effort, the European Parliament now has more sites on fewer servers. “Thanks to project grouping and clustering, deployment time has been decreased by 96% on certain projects, and the number of servers has been decreased by 20%, leading to increased performance and stability and an overall reduction in costs,” said Christophe Debauche.

Multiple internet, intranet and extranet sites of the European Parliament rely on the Jahia cluster. One of the most important projects, the Parliament’s intranet (SIFE), brings together all of the Parliament’s intranet and extranet sites. This represents 30,000 visits per day, or seven million page views per year, along with 90 full-time editors who provide content for the sites in three languages and documentation in an additional 21 languages. 10,000 users currently have login credentials.

The European Parliament’s development team continues to work closely with Atos & Jahia to improve their solution, with dozens of QoL updates already being implemented.