The Bennett & Coleman Group of publications
has the largest Readership in the world.
It has many newspapers and magazines being
published simultaneously in seventeen cities
across India namely - The Times of India,
Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Maharashtra
Times, Filmfare, Femina etc.
It employs hundreds of reporters and journalists
to gather news and information from many
locations. Many journalists, artists, analysts
and other staff are engaged in creating
the material that will be finally merged
with the advertisements and classified sections
to generate the pages for multiple editions
to be printed at various presses, some of
which are not owned by BCCL. In additions
BCCL has various web editions which are
fed from these sources.
It has an excellent Wide Area Network
connectivity using 2mpbs connections across
India for data transfers.
The lifeline of this gigantic organization
is the network over which this data flows
first as raw text and images and then
back again as finished pages. Nerve centers
of this operation are the editorial and
printing centers.
The heart of this system is the Data
management and communications software
which pumps this data relentlessly over
the network to these centers and makes
it available where it is needed.
On an average there is more than a gigabyte
of data going to any center from other
centers daily.
Managing and tracking such volumes of
data (thousands of files) across the WAN,
manually was an impossible task. It needed
to be automated!
After evaluating various options, vendors,
none was found satisfactory.
Caravan Business Server was evaluated
as the Core engine, to cater to this requirement.
The Data management and Communications
system is running on distributed Caravan
servers at all the publishing and printing
centers. It is a mission critical application
where even small problems and delays can
lead to chaos. |
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Completely Intranet
based application |
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Automatic file replication across
remote directories (baskets) |
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Interface to editorial systems |
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User interface for editorial, systems
and process staff |
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Management of users |
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User interface for administration.
Remote administration. Can login to
any Caravan Server across the intranet |
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Live Queue management and monitoring |
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Day wise log Status for data transferred
and received. Gives info on data sent
to which locations, what time received,
view |
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the data via a click, time taken
to transfer, author, from which location,
filename and path, etc |
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