Reksoft develops S7 Airlines media platform

2022: Media Platform Development

Reksoft on October 25, 2022 announced the development of the S7 Airlines media platform.

The partnership of S7 Airlines and Reksoft started in 2009. The combined cross-functional team is engaged in the constant development and support of the airline's web resources. In 2021, the customer's management decided to create a separate media platform on the basis of the "Guides" and "Blogs" sections on S7.ru site. As of October 2022, the average daily audience of blogs is more than 10 thousand unique users.

Our task was to create a single media resource, a kind of ecosystem for our customers - travel lovers, where it would be easy to create a route, a selection of interests, and subsequently share their own emotions and impressions with a community of the same passionate travelers, - commented on the goal of the project Alexander Yatkevich, product manager from S7 Group.

For nine months of 2022, the audience of S7 Media exceeded 2 million users - this is already comparable to the audience of large ones. the Russian MEDIA We are not going to stop there: our global goal is to become the No. 1 travel resource in so Russia that users can not only be inspired to travel, but also get everything they need information about the rules and requirements, and even fully "collect" their journey, "said editor-in-chief Maxim Popov.

To implement the task, the project team created a full-fledged media platform, which continued the development of the previously developed Reksoft in the interests of the S7 content platform CMS Cabin. It allows you to easily create and multiply interesting content on all Internet sites of the S7 Airlines ecosystem.

The S7 media portal includes several independent blocks: news, travel guides, travel blogs, articles, as well as thematic sections (ecotourism, gastronomic travel, winter holidays, beach season, author's tours, etc.).

From a technological point of view, the portal implements a wysiwyg editor created specifically for the customer. It allows S7 Airlines editors to independently, without involving IT specialists, release content and replicate it to all media formats of the platform. Moreover, the editors themselves choose the text and visual formats they need. In addition, the wysiwyg editor is used in the Compass section, where tour guides and authors can create material about their tour or route themselves. Materials in "Compass" are published after editorial moderation.

Special attention should be paid to the work of the team to create an API of the airline ecosystem that integrates the created materials into the main site and mobile applications for different platforms. The media portal is adapted for all types of mobile devices without downloading applications.

In addition, not only articles are created on the basis of the developed media platform, but also interactive content for the S7 Green Steps ESG project in the airline's mobile applications. After reading the article, the user is offered a small quiz. If the user answered correctly, they get miles to their account.

The cross-functional team of S7 Airlines and Reksoft continues to develop the project. The plans are to enable users to create content themselves and share their impressions of travel. Already now they can like and write comments under articles. Thanks to working with tags, a unique ribbon is formed for each user, taking into account his interests, and in the future, S7 customers will be able to collect their own travel collections.

2021: DevOps Process Automation for Content Platform

On July 12, 2021, Reksoft announced the details of the DevOps process automation project for the S7 Airlines content platform.

The Reksoft team was tasked with automating DevOps for the entire S7 content platform with a friendly interface for content and marketing employees of the airline who are not IT specialists. As a result, a DevOps platform was written that automates all the necessary actions to update more than a hundred routine operations in such a way that they can be performed without involving an IT team. If necessary, updates follow the established schedule or are performed for a specific task.

DevOps processes for seasonal or thematic ticket sales pages were automated in the same way. This allows S7 marketing employees to independently test landings and their full functionality before displaying pages on the airline's official resources. The platform is also actively used by all employees of the development team, without involving backend or DevOps specialists in the tasks.

In addition, the platform has the functionality of protecting against unauthorized output of landings and pages to official resources, which eliminates a number of standard errors when the task is executed online.

A separate big task of the project was to automate DevOps components for the operation of S7 Internet resources in the Chinese segment of the Network, taking into account all local norms and features.

As of July 2021, about 100 airline employees who are not IT specialists work with S7 Internet resources. It was important for us that they could all work online without waiting for someone from the development team to be released. It was this need that closed the project with Reksoft to automate DevOps. The platform made it possible to reduce the time for displaying the necessary pages and landings in public access by 2 times, - commented on the project Alexander Yatkevich, product manager from the S7 Group.

For us, this is a very interesting constantly developing project that immediately solves the problems of the development team and the customer's business team, minimizing the time spent by both parties. Only during 6 months of this year, our platform saved more than a hundred man-hours of employees of the combined team, - said Zurab Beliy, head of Java practice at Reksoft.

2020: Completion of the main stage of the creation of CMS Cabin, global SEO optimization of the S7 Airlines website

On February 8, 2021, it became known that S7 Airlines, a private airline in Russia, and Reksoft, one of the leading Russian developers of digital solutions, summed up the results of joint work in 2020.

S7 Airlines and Reksoft summed up the results of joint work in 2020

As reported, the partnership between S7 Airlines and Reksoft started in 2009. Since then, the joint cross-functional team has been constantly developing and supporting the main information portal of the airline: S7.RU In addition, within the framework of the team's responsibility, creating portal integrations with internal and external information resources and systems, including the booking system, billing, CRM system, etc.

One of the important achievements of cooperation between S7 Airlines and Reksoft in 2020 was the completion of the main stage to create its own content management system - CMS Cabin and preparation for the allocation of the solution as a separate product. The system is maximally adapted to the company's tasks and has the possibility of flexible further customization. For example, CMS Cabin allows you to deploy and configure marketing initiatives such as global ticket sales in just a few hours, attracting a large number of S7 Airlines customers to the site from all regions of the country and the world. So, with the help of this mechanism in 2020, the company held 6 major ticket sales. Based on the results of the platform operation, it was decided to use it for the entire S7 Airlines media resource block.

Also in 2020, the team completely redesigned and updated the functionality of the ticket search unit and selection of flight directions. For example, thematic search functions and destination recommendations were added, when the client is offered all possible airline flight options depending on the departure location, interests (city, beach, mountains), financial capabilities and acceptable travel dates.

In addition, the airline offers passengers a mechanism for tracking ticket prices for destinations of interest. Analytics are convenient for customers to make decisions about buying and planning an economical journey. Simultaneously with the search, the site offers visitors possible flight options selected in accordance with the interests of a particular client.

In 2020, a global SEO optimization of the entire portal was carried out, including with the reworking of pages from the S7 Airlines Blog, which collected useful information on all cities of the airline's flights. Including a number of integrations with resources that "pull up" relevant information about the region into materials: weather forecast, exchange rates, etc.

A separate block should be allocated to the work of the joint team on the initiatives of S7 Airlines in the framework of interaction with passengers in a lockdown situation. In the spring of 2020, the company faced the task of working with passengers who, due to the situation with the coronavirus, were unable to use the purchased tickets. The first initiative of S7 Airlines, announced on March 30, 2020, was the "Fly at Home" campaign: for a month for each day spent at home, travelers received 100 miles to a personal account in the S7 Priority loyalty program. The project page was developed and launched by the team a week after the decision to hold the action was made.

Two more sections of the S7.RU portal as part of working with passengers during the pandemic were the pages of the S7 Care and Doctors on Board programs. The first is devoted to all aspects of passenger protection in a pandemic at each stage of the journey. Additional security measures introduced at base airports and on all S7 Airlines flights were reflected here: from phased boarding and thorough cleaning of each aircraft to the preparation of individual sets of protective equipment for each passenger. The Doctors on Board section talks about a joint privilege program for S7 Airlines medical professionals and the Association of Aviation Medicine Physicians (AVAM).

Also, the implementation of the autumn campaign of S7 Airlines, which focused on digital formats, became a non-trivial technical case. Its center was a project to create custom online guides to Russia, which was supplemented by banner placement and support on social networks. The guide is based on photos and recommendations of users on Instagram. To become a member of the project, you had to post a photo on the Instagram feed, put the hashtag# co-authorsS7 and mark the @ s7airlines account. All photos were collected in the gallery on the s7.ru website, and the editions of the guide to different regions of Russia were regularly posted in the Stories of the airline's official page on the social network. From a technical point of view, the project was interesting for automating site interplay S7.RU with the social network API through a built-in application for automatically "pulling up" the most popular photos and developing a mechanism for protecting against "cheating."

In cooperation with Reksoft, the involvement of the team in our projects and initiatives is important for us. This makes it possible to qualitatively implement all projects as soon as possible, which was especially important in 2020. In addition, I want to note the proper degree of automation of work and the platform as a whole, which gives us the opportunity to display services without interruption in the resource. commented on cooperation Alexander Yatkevich, product manager from S7 Group

2012: Single Web Platform Project

The main goal of the project to create a single web platform of the company - http://www.s7.ru - is to increase the conversion of site visitors to buyers, expand the range of online consulting services about products and services to reduce the burden on the company's contact center. To achieve these goals, it was necessary to change the technology platform and use the most modern technologies.

At the first stage, the Reksoft project team conducted a detailed assessment of existing technology platforms and worked out all possible scenarios for migration and future operation of the portal, taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of various systems. This work allowed S7 Airlines to make an informed decision on the feasibility of migration and choose a new content management system (CMS) for the portal. As part of the migration project, the S7 Airlines client portal was successfully transferred to a new platform, including business logic, functionality and design.

'As a result of the completion of the first stage, we received a single web platform that allowed us to continue the development of the site, increase information content and convenience for our passengers. The first steps in this development were event marketing systems and a dynamic recommendation platform. These systems will allow you to show information and special offers, taking into account the wishes and preferences of the user. We are grateful to the Reksoft team for a proactive approach during the implementation of the project and hope for continued joint work, "said Bayandin Yegor, S7 Technology Director.