The six figure contract is for the supply of Mediasurface's innovative Morello 5.3.5 content management solution which includes the recently released Morello Web Client. The contract will support New Star's aggressive growth plans for its international fund business and underpin expansion by making offshore funds available to intermediaries and clients via the web.

In addition to new international sites, New Star plans to migrate its existing UK Retail, Corporate, Institutional and Hedge Fund sites into a new single Corporate web site.

This will enable New Star to benefit from the central management and re-use of content across all of its web operations, enabling a significant reduction in operational costs and increased editorial productivity.

Previously New Star has worked alongside web agencies to deliver new sites and make changes to existing ones. Over time and with expansion, requirements for its web operations have matured and become more demanding in terms of personalisation and sophistication, this has led to complex navigation and structure, and time consuming alterations. The decision was taken to bring operations back in-house and empower the marketing team to assist in its growth.

The project to select and implement a new Content Management System is being led by Rob Tyler, Web Project Manager at New Star. Rob commented: "Mediasurface was chosen following a comprehensive review of the systems available. With Morello, our marketing teams will be able to own the complete publishing lifecycle, reducing our reliance on IT and web agencies and enabling us to rapidly create and maintain our online presence."

The company is looking forward to a host of other gains, including brand consistency across its sites, reduced time to market for content changes and micro-sites, increased customer self-service and more secure management of content.

Rob Page, Marketing Director at New Star Investment said: "Morello will enable us to significantly benefit from the re-use of online information across the group, reducing operational costs and increasing productivity. The system will help us with financial regulatory compliance and traceability, and help us to achieve leading industry standards of AAA accessibility."

Nick Smee Sales Director at Mediasurface said of the announcement: "Mediasurface is to provide its latest 5.3.5 content and knowledge management software, along with implementation services, training and ongoing support. We are pleased to be working with such a dynamic, fast moving company. The improved websites will enable New Star to guide customers towards targeted and relevant promotions, based on customer profile and history. It will enable simple and intelligent searching across all of the sites, a simplified navigational structure, more dynamic content and improved interactivity with clients. With Mediasurface's new Instant Site rapid site building tool, New Star will be able to create new web sites in less than ten clicks."

New Star plans to publish its first Morello-powered web sites soon after the end of its first quarter, with the entire web operation, including internet and intranet sites being content managed and dynamically published by Morello during 2006.