Adobe Success Story

Simon & Schuster is a global leader in the field of general interest publishing.

Challenge

To provide complete resources for booksellers and online and offline retailers as well as information and threaded discussions among consumers and authors.

Benefits

· ColdFusion is easy for less-technical staff to use.
· Despite its simplicity, ColdFusion supports sophisticated development techniques and sites.
· Site experienced a five-fold improvement in performance and much better stability.

Project Details

For years, Simon & Schuster has been a major force in trade, mass market, and children's publishing, with 38 imprints ranging from Pocket Books and Scribner to The Free Press and Touchstone. The company publishes about 2,100 titles annually, including numerous bestsellers from Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, Bob Woodward, Stephen Ambrose, and Frank McCourt.

However, this Viacom subsidiary has also moved smartly to bring its expertise in creating, packaging, branding, and distributing entertainment to new media, including books on tape, interactive titles, and groundbreaking work in electronic books. In fact, Simon & Schuster has pioneered numerous firsts in eBooks, including the international phenomenon by Stephen King, "Riding The Bullet," publishing the entire collection of author Mary Higgins Clark in electronic format; and writing and designing books exclusively for the e-book format, including Star Trek: S.C.E, original content based on the popular entertainment franchise.

Given its forward-thinking perspective, it's not surprising that Simon & Schuster has also quickly and aggressively embraced the Web as an integral component of its overall marketing strategy in numerous ways. The company's SimonSays.com site provides complete resources for booksellers and online and offline retailers as well as information and threaded discussions among consumers and authors.

Smarter and Faster

According to David Juman, executive producer of Simon & Schuster Online, the growth of the initial site was challenging the company's Online team. "There were so many site projects planned, and we needed a framework with which to implement Online's vision. Online decided that what was needed at the time was a solution that would give content owners more independence and would free Online staff to focus on higher-value projects."

Simon & Schuster began to evaluate new Web development platforms and options for redeploying the site for greater performance and scalability. "We thought about building it in Perl or Active Server Pages," Juman said. "And we looked closely at Vignette. But those solutions were going to involve long, complex development cycles. We needed was something smarter and faster."

After a complete evaluation process, Simon & Schuster decided to build the next generation of its site using Macromedia ColdFusion. With products that are consistently rated by customers and analysts among the most productive, versatile, and accessible in the industry, Macromedia enables both high profile and up-and-coming companies to create innovative Web solutions. Macromedia's family of application servers and visual authoring tools, combined with its application framework, form a complete software infrastructure for building online applications that help companies reach new customers, improve customer service, and maximize business efficiency.

ColdFusion is an application server for building and deploying scalable Web applications that integrate browser, server, and database. Open integration with databases, e-mail, directories, XML, and enterprise systems enables Web developers to build sophisticated applications quickly and easily. ColdFusion also provides security on every level, from Web development through deployment.

Taking it to a Higher Level

According to Michael Rais, director of online technology of Simon & Schuster Online "The cost of entry with Macromedia is very low and the ease-of-use is very high. Now our producers can assume more responsibility for the content of their areas without calling on a technical specialist. The entry to ColdFusion is easier than other languages, but you can still take it to higher levels when needed."

Consultants from G.Triad, a Macromedia Alliance Partner, then redesigned the technology implementation of SimonSays.com from the ground up. The project was a success, and afterwards Online continued to build upon the framework delivered by G. Triad using an underlying architecture developed by Rais called Distributed Switchboard/Centralized Object.

"This is a new architectural approach that we created for ColdFusion developers that provides a high level of performance and code manageability," said Rais, "In combination with a caching architecture, DSCO enables our site to serve more than 100,000 output permutations in an average of 50 ms. We use a conventional switchboard paradigm with centralized objects that include customized tags to mimic certain functions. That shields our producers from a lot of the background complexity."

In less than four months, a team of G.Triad programmers and S&S staff rebuilt the entire site. "Without a doubt, ColdFusion allows non-programmers to easily do minor tasks and at the same time enables specialists to write coding abstractions that support an industrial-strength site. Not requiring a specialist to write and rewrite every piece of code is a major time savings for us" said Rais.

Perhaps the most interesting area is where authors and readers can interact with one another in a community area of the site. "Many of our authors are actually asking us to include a Web presence and promotion for them on our site," Sandy Flynn, director of e-commerce for Simon & Schuster Online, explained. "So we've built more than 30 community sites, threads, bulletin boards, and moderated discussions on different authors, categories, and topics. These features are really enhancing the author's relationships with his or her readers. The Web opens that avenue up for us."

Driven in part by this community aspect, SimonSays.com today has more than 400,000 unique visitors each month and more than 2.5 million page views per month.

"We're seeing over 100% growth in the site," Rais said, "and ColdFusion has mitigated our scalability concerns. We've seen a five-fold improvement in performance and much better stability as well, and we have no doubt that we'll be able to scale well beyond the traffic levels that we are currently seeing, while maintaining our same framework. There certainly are a lot of exciting things planned, and as far as I'm concerned ColdFusion is the application server of choice."

Site Summary

Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Macromedia Products:
ColdFusion Enterprise 4.5.1 SP1, ColdFusion Studio 4.5.1

Hardware:
Sun Sparc Enterprise 220R, 1 GB RAM

Operating System
Sun Solaris 2.6 w/patches

Database:
Oracle 8i

Size of DB:
70 MB

Internet Connection:
T1

Development Team:
3 part-time developers, 3 full-time producers, 1 full-time technologist

Site Traffic:
More than 400,000 unique visitors each month and more than 2.5 million page views per month

Industry
Publishing

Benefits

Ease of Development—"ColdFusion has a low entry point for developers. It's easy for less-technical team members to use."

Power — "Despite its simplicity, ColdFusion can support sophisticated development techniques and sites."

Scalability — "We've seen a five-fold improvement in performance and much better stability."