| The Bennett
& Coleman group of publications
has the highest Readership in the
world. The group publications uses
internally a SAP Media system for
advertisement tracking and billing
that has been integrated with the
pre-press system. It was found that
most of the display ad material had
become digitalized and the agencies
were delivering them to the newspaper
premises in record able media like
CD, floppy etc. |
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| Most of these ads would be booked manually,
through the SAP based system tagged by the
release order number given by the agency.
There was no facility collect the display
artwork material through the Internet.
To make it convenient for the agencies
to deliver the material through the Internet
a digital ad acceptance site was created
using Caravan Business Server.
Caravan provides the user interface,
workflow, preflighting and tracking for
the ads received on this site. The user
interface includes registration, authentication,
ad upload menu, and status information.
An administration menu allows the creation
of various types of users, file status
tracking etc.
Because it is exposed to the Internet
community, a firewall is installed between
the Caravan server and the internal network.
Another Caravan server inside the network
duplicates all the information from the
external server. Preflighting software
checks the integrity and suitability of
the graphic image. If the digital display
material is accepted by the preflighting
system then corrected and converted file
is forwarded to response coordinator handling
the agency. Email prompts are sent to
the agency and the coordinators, regarding
the status of the upload including the
error report, in case of rejection.
The caravan server sits on 2 mbps dedicated
link to the Internet.
A similar user interface is provided
internally and externally, allowing the
users to submit ads either from the Internet
or through the intranet on behalf of agencies
that deliver it to our remote offices.
Caravan system was chosen for this system
because it integrates application logic,
mail, data transfer and database engine
in one package. This reduces the infrastructure,
development and maintenance costs and
leads to a faster and evolutionary implementation.
There are currently more than 500 users
on this system and it has been working
flawlessly since 2 years with zero down
time.
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