Allergan is a technology-driven, global health care company that develops and commercializes specialty pharmaceutical products for the eye care, neuromodulator, and skin care markets. The company’s products are marketed in over 100 countries worldwide. The company employs approximately 5,200 people worldwide and differentiates itself from other specialty pharmaceutical companies by its discovery-to-development research programs and its global marketing and sales capabilities.
Today, global companies have to contend with a new content management challenge — that of managing external, customer-facing content across the globe. In 2000, Allergan created a business initiative to redesign its Internet presence. The company has now launched six Web sites. The content for each Web site was managed primarily by regional third-party Web vendors. Because there was previously no central content management tool to enforce consistency, each site had a different look and feel and conveyed a different message. Because of the diverse Web sites, Internet visitors did not see Allergan as one global company.

Also, the FDA requires a tremendous amount of documentation to support each request to investigate or market a new pharmaceutical product. In the past, this documentation has consisted of reams and reams of paper and required vast amounts of storage space. But within the next few years, the FDA will begin requiring that this documentation be submitted electronically in the form of PDF and SAS files and indexed for easy searching. Allergan already submits some of its documentation electronically, but the sooner it can meet this forthcoming requirement, the sooner the company can eliminate the costs of printing and shipping paper documentation.

In 1998, Allergan turned to Documentum to help manage content for its research and development, manufacturing, and regulatory compliance areas. Because of its success with Documentum for enterprise document management (EDM) Allergan chose Documentum again in 2001, this time to manage all of the Web content for the company’s new Internet presence and its six global Web sites. The company completed redesign of its Web sites and went live with Documentum Web content management in July 2002. Leveraging the Documentum platform further, Allergan plans to add several new Web sites in the future and is already moving toward completely electronic submissions to the FDA.

Since preserving Allergan brand integrity worldwide is essential to the success of its business, Allergan’s main goal with the July 2002 launch was to present a unified, consistent image across all its Web sites. To this end, using Documentum Web Publisher and XML, Allergan developed over 1,200 XML-based Web page templates. Derived from 50 core templates, these Web page templates form the basis for all the pages on its various Web sites. For instance, templates for investor relations pages include press release templates, financial statement templates, company profile templates, and so on. Product information templates include templates for each specific product with different versions for consumers and medical practitioners.

By using these templates, every page on every Allergan site can be built with the same look and feel. According to Bereskin, “Documentum and XML are enabling us to provide a consistent brand image and content to our customers worldwide.”