Reimagining NIPO on a Modern Content Platform

Intro

The Norwegian Industrial Property Office (NIPO) is a Norwegian government agency and a national competency center for knowledge about intellectual property rights and values. The agency was established in 1911 and is under the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Fisheries. Its main task is to process applications for rights to inventions, trademarks, and designs.

Since the license for the previous publishing system (CMS) was about to expire, NIPO had to procure a new digital solution. A tender round was started in autumn 2022, where the technology company 99x was chosen for development and system integration, with Enonic as the platform. After strenuous work throughout 2023, the new website was finally launched in January 2024.

Challenge

NIPO’s website was already several years old, and the existing agreement was becoming outdated. In addition to Patentstyret.no, the agency has developed several digital services for its clients, including a large searchable register for applications and registrations related to trademarks, patents, and designs. These services are built internally, with different digital frameworks than the website.

The existing CMS was on-premise, and NIPO wanted to lift the website out into the cloud to ensure a flexible and future-proof solution. In the run-up to the website project, NIPO also carried out various types of insight work, which showed that customers and users had problems understanding what the agency was doing and wanted to convey.

NIPO had large amounts of content, which would have to have a new structure with future-proofing in mind. The website and digital services also had no common header and footer, and the overall customer experience was lacking.

In other words, there was a wide range of challenges, including content and services, in different languages and with a dose of technical debt. NIPO therefore had to find a way to stitch everything together better, to become more understandable, holistic, and long-term.

Solution

Overall Project

For NIPO, it was important to get a flexible and future-oriented solution for publishing and content management. When choosing a new vendor, it was therefore important to be flexible and open—they would for instance not specify too narrow requirements. They searched broadly, but with headless as a guideline.

The fact that Enonic can be used as headless, i.e. content decoupled from presentation, is something that NIPO considered a strength, and is something they will explore further in the future. Headless will also be used to address the fact that the user interfaces on the website and the other digital services are different and have different maintenance notifications.

In addition to choosing the architecture for the new solution, another priority was to define the target groups. The target groups that were set up were a) unaware/inexperienced and b) aware/experienced users. NIPO’s main target group is the former, but the experienced ones are also important, such as law firms and agents who help customers with patent, trademark, and design rights. NIPO is working further to find a good customer journey also for the experienced.

During the construction of the new website, 99x and design partner Netlife Bergen implemented a design process for the new identity. User testing was carried out on new elements and features, and the design went through several iterations based on feedback.

Concrete Solutions

The IPR test: This is a self-test to find out what kind of intellectual property rights (IPRs) you need. NIPO originally had a joint website with Innovation Norway for this test, but it was shut down in favor of a new version on the new website.

NIPO also entered into a collaboration with the Norwegian Directorate of eHealth, now the Norwegian Directorate of Health, to increase knowledge of IPR among purchasers, suppliers, and investors in the healthcare sector.

The result was a completely new test consisting of checklists tailored to the target groups. It shows graph-based results along the way about the extent to which trademark, design, and patent are important for one’s company.

The test is built up flexibly, making it useful for people in other sectors too, as NIPO can build more tests with the same framework. Here, answer alternatives and weightings are entered by a content editor. In addition, the editor can create variations of all or parts of the result page, which are displayed based on the results.

The function is still under development and is displayed in both Bokmål and Nynorsk.

Nynorsk Translator: This application, developed by 99x and Totaltekst, translates text in Content Studio, the CMS of the Enonic platform, to Nynorsk. As a public agency, NIPO is required to have 25% of its content in Nynorsk. Content producers at NIPO therefore see a great advantage in having a Nynorsk translator directly within the editor interface.

NIPO mixes Bokmål and Nynorsk on the same website and no longer keeps the two written languages separate. Content editors need to manually override some translations, but most of the work is more or less automatic. An English translator has also been developed, which has just been put into production.

HubSpot Integration: NIPO uses a two-way integration between Enonic and the CRM solution HubSpot for its courses. The courses are presented in Enonic, while date, location, time, registration, etc. are in HubSpot and are retrieved via an API by Enonic.

This solution allows content editors to change the information in one place, which is then reflected on all visible surfaces..

Microservices: NIPO will use microservices to create, among other things, a common header and footer for the website and the other digital services. This will create a better and more holistic customer journey.

Maintenance notifications: Work is underway on a common system for maintenance messages, based on headless technology. Such messages can be edited in one place and posted on all NIPO platforms.

The specific solution consists of a separate project/team in Content Studio, where 99x can build technical components and modules. These will then be exposed through GraphQL. The solution is currently in planning and testing, so all the details are not yet in place.