Breaking down silos: How TomTom creates content for a moving world

• Headquarters: Amsterdam, the Netherlands
• Frameworks: NextJS, TypeScript, Tailwind, Docker, Azure DevOps, Kubernetes

TomTom is a technology company offering map and location technology to help people find their way over the past 30 years. Companies like Uber, Volkswagen Group, and Microsoft use TomTom's location technology across different products worldwide. Storyblok has helped TomTom streamline content operations by giving their teams more control.

Section titled Challenges faced by TomTom with their previous CMS Challenges faced by TomTom with their previous CMS

Over the past 10 years, TomTom used Tridion, which focused primarily on translation and localization. Alongside this, other teams also used Drupal. They found it had a difficult learning curve, making users depend on different people for help and updates. On the technical side, it was tailored more towards XML and Java rather than modern website frameworks and applications. This resulted in many technical adaptations to make the site work with React and NextJS, with much clutter in data responses.

Due to this, the team noticed an increasing decentralization of ownership over what could be done with the CMS. TomTom faced many challenges in addition to this, including:

• The need for a user-friendly interface: The previous systems took a lot of manual work and time to create a single page. Developers had to get involved to help to publish content. On top of this, there was no good feature to preview the page before publishing and scheduling releases.
• A heavy learning curve: Onboarding new employees internally to the CMS was a complex task.
• Lack of user roles to streamline content operations: The brand had to rely on a waterfall method, going from team to team to put content together. This created a static workflow and bottlenecks. There were no collaboration features that could help different teams work in parallel.
• A flexible CMS: TomTom needed a ready-made CMS integration for JavaScript instead of creating a custom solution. Alongside this, developers needed a CMS that handled a best-of-breed approach.

Section titled Creating a collaborative content process Creating a collaborative content process

After 3 months of searching for a new CMS solution, TomTom came across Storyblok, making it into the shortlist. Other CMSs had a completely different philosophy regarding how content should be structured. Storyblok stood out for how TomTom could create pages and components that could be accessed and applied differently. This made it a flexible and excellent solution to TomTom's needs in building new sites and migrating existing ones. Based on this, Storyblok helped TomTom streamline its content operations through:

• An intuitive Visual Editor: Being user-friendly, non-technical users can easily work with content. This has simplified the onboarding process for those outside marketing.
• Collaborative workflows for all teams: The Visual Editor's collaboration features allow real-time commenting. Teams can work directly inside pages and push content faster. Content Authoring and Content Locking also help unify workflows so that each team member can get involved at the right place and time. Releases have also enabled teams to schedule and push pages as needed when needed.
• Atomic content organization: TomTom organizes components using the atomic design principle. This has given more flexibility in the content creation process and code-wise. Teams can hit the ground running and start creating new content quickly.
• Flexible schemas: Developers can access flexibility code-wise with changeable schemas for new insights. Developers can structure blocks as assets and separate them from data sources inside Storyblok. Existing blocks and structures can be repurposed for different pages rather than building from scratch.

As a result, TomTom uses Storyblok to serve several web applications. TomTom's digital marketing team is a significant user of Storyblok, including SEO specialists, copywriters, developers, web editors, and QA engineers.

Section titled Creating content for a moving world Creating content for a moving world

Section titled Collaboration made simple Collaboration made simple

Collaboration has been an essential benefit of TomTom's Storyblok usage, allowing different teams to work in parallel on each page. TomTom quickly migrated its newsroom section and blog with the aid of Content Authoring and Locking. The migration to launch took 3 months, consisting of around 150 news articles and blog posts.

Based on their previous experience, pushing a page like this live would have taken an hour. Today, TomTom can do this in 10 minutes maximum. As a result, content development costs have decreased by 30%. This is due to internal web editors being able to streamline the content process instead of relying on external editors as they did before.

Section titled Simplifying the learning curve for all teams Simplifying the learning curve for all teams

Teams no longer depend on each other to publish content and new pages. TomTom's team was able to onboard quickly to Storyblok before sharing the knowledge with other teams.

TomTom is a brand that has connected individuals worldwide to where they need to go. In a moving world, speaking the customer's language is fundamental. At the moment, TomTom is looking to migrate other parts of the website, including many different languages consisting of thousands of pages. Using a best-of-breed approach with Storyblok, TomTom can connect any translation and localization integration to Storyblok.