Adobe Success Story

Streamline and manage campaign planning and execution, resource management, project-based communications and workflow, and reporting between the advertising agency and client.

Benefits

· Tight cost and campaign controls, with built-in exception notifications.
· Up-to-date and historical information is immediately available to all stakeholders.
· Streamlined business processes including faster approvals.
· Business owners can customise content and processes without need for developer involvement.
· Enhanced client reporting, satisfaction, and relationships.
· Generic extranet business model can be applied to any client project.

Project Details

"eMCSaatchi needed something that would give us a rapid development and deployment environment, ease of implementation, robustness, scalability and cost-effectiveness. Macromedia satisfied all the criteria—offering a complete product suite that could be used throughout the whole development cycle." Simon Smith, Technology Director

The Sydney-based head office of global Internet services firm eMCSaatchi used Macromedia ColdFusion to develop an extranet that improves client communications and streamlines project management processes.

The extranet provides a central information repository from which clients can access a wealth of project material in sections spanning calendars, schedules, project management, risk management, change management, and approvals.

Increasing Business Efficiency and Facilitating Workflow

Established in June 2000, eMCSaatchi delivers "Internet-improved businesses" by providing clients with innovative and analytical solutions to their Internet business needs, from strategy development to design and deployment.

Using Macromedia ColdFusion and JRun, eMCSaatchi not only created an effective extranet for client communication and project management, but also delivered a tailored version of the site for its sister company, leading global advertising agency M&C Saatchi.

M&C Saatchi has already used the extranet to manage and deliver a major campaign for an international hotel chain with multiple brands and properties throughout Asia Pacific.

The extranet provides a centralized information hub for all stakeholders, including client management at properties in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and China, and agency staff at M&C Saatchi offices throughout the region.

"There were about 40 M&C Saatchi people involved in the project, and between five and 10 people per hotel location on the client side. They needed a communication portal to ensure any communication between the agency and client was captured, audited and held in a central project information repository," said eMCSaatchi Technology Director Simon Smith.

"The extranet filled a great need for a central access point for everyone in those multiple locations. We believe it is vital for everyone to have access to the same information to ensure consistency in brand communication across the different geographic markets."

Information was separated into a number of categories. Project Management and Operations contains information on the status of the project, reports, meeting, notes, and a calendar of events. The Guardbook section provides a repository of all branding-related content including graphics, TV advertisements, print ads, and other collateral.

The Positioning section provides a file and document management repository and stores graphical components, such as brand logos. The Administration section enables the administrator to add users and manage permission levels for site users.

"We used ColdFusion and JRun server using Java components to give users the ability to customize the site and add pages or sections as they needed to without having to go back to the developer. They could generate it themselves, which saved considerable time," said Smith.

"A workflow component automated the approval process for collateral. Print advertisements were published on the extranet to be viewed and approved by the client online. Clients were alerted via email to the need for approval or any changes that had been made.

"Project stakeholders were able to keep up to date with the project and its progress because all the documentation was available on the extranet. It delivered productivity benefits and enhanced client communications and satisfaction," added Smith.

A Shortened Development Cycle

eMCSaatchi delivered the project within a short timeframe. "The combination of ColdFusion and JRun enabled us to meet the tight development challenge. ColdFusion's intuitive, tag-based language reduced the time needed to build and deploy a quality Internet application."

"The JRun administrative screens were intuitive and enabled seamless integration to the ColdFusion server, which reduced the time it took us to deploy a distributed Java Internet application. The server itself was easy to deploy.

"We were able to integrate a number of development tools within the one environment. ColdFusion 4.5 UltraDev 4 Studio enabled us to code in a number of technologies—CFML, HTML, and JSP. That was a great benefit because our developers didn't have to swap between different development environments—they could develop and test and integrate it together using Macromedia solutions."

"The seamless, proven integration between the Macromedia products enabled us to build a central location for agency and client communication and all project information that ensures nothing is missed or misunderstood," said Smith.

eMCSaatchi integrates the use of Macromedia products throughout its business: "Our company specializes in three areas—strategy, customer experience including information architecture and how customers interact with the site, and back-end technical development," said Smith.

"Macromedia products allow us to streamline how we work with each area. The creative department uses Flash, Dreamweaver, and Director, while the development team works with JRun and ColdFusion Server. The various Macromedia products work well together and provide seamless integration."

In assessing which platform and products it would use for the extranet development, eMCSaatchi had a shopping list of desirable criteria.

"We wanted something that would give us a rapid development and deployment environment, ease of implementation, robustness, scalability and cost-effectiveness. We also wanted something that would let utilize in-house developer knowledge and capabilities," said Smith.

"We considered various development products, freeware applications like PHP and a full Java solution, but we chose Macromedia because its products satisfied all the criteria we were looking for. Macromedia offered a complete product suite that we could use throughout the whole development cycle."

Optimizing Performance and Improving the User Experience

A key factor in eMCSaatchi's decided to use the most recent version of ColdFusion (version 5) was the usefulness of the new features. These new features assisted eMCSaatchi in solving a number of issues.

For example, within the communications portal, several pages for configuring security permissions contained very large and complicated queries, resulting in an exceptionally slow load time. eMCSaatchi considered it unacceptable for users to sit and wait for this time without receiving some feedback on whether the system was actually responding to their request to load the pages. The new tag presented a simple way to get partial page results out to the user so that they knew the system was working and could view some of the results immediately.

Query of queries was another problem-solving feature. Even with the improved usability of the permissions page added by the tag, the pages were still too slow. To optimize the speed of loading, it would be necessary to avoid iterating through large query results to find permissions for a given page. Using query of queries, it was now possible to select a smaller set of permissions relating only to the page being processed. This was done by doing a select into a new query on the larger permissions query instead of passing a huge query set of permissions to the custom tag. The results were profound, reducing the download time for the page from over a minute to seven seconds!

eMCSaatchi also added user-defined functions to make using the system easier for the largely inexperienced userbase. The site needed to display sizes of various files contained within the extranet system throughout the site. The default was to return the file size in bytes rather than kilobytes or megabytes. This was difficult for the users to understand. By including a user-defined function to format the file size into the appropriate unit of measurement in the universal header file, user-friendly display of sizes was available throughout the site.

The Results—Speedy Development, Reduced Costs, Faster Time to Market

The rapid development environment provided by ColdFusion enabled the eMCSaatchi development team of one project manager, one business analyst, two developers, one test analyst , and a technology architect to complete the $200,000 extranet project within six months.

"If we had used technologies other than Macromedia, I believe it would have taken two months longer to complete, and that would have carried a cost in missed business opportunities. The speed of development with Macromedia not only got our product to market faster, it reduced our production costs by reducing head hours," said Smith.

While the extranet is currently offered to clients in Asia Pacific, the next phase will incorporate a global offering to clients from the M&C Saatchi and eMCSaatchi corporations.

"It's a generic extranet-based business model that can be applied to any of the ad agency's clients. It's a tool that they're already using to attract new clients."

"eMCSaatchi's unique point of difference is our ability to offer both innovation and cost effectiveness to our clients. By using ColdFusion and JRun we are able to develop applications quickly that give us great flexibility. We could have used other products to develop in, but the result would have been limited. Macromedia products are robust and can scale to many users," concluded Smith.

Site Summary

Company Web address: emcsaatchi.com.au
Company industry: Internet services and digital marketing
Macromedia products: ColdFusion 5 Enterprise Server, JRun Enterprise 3.1 Server, ColdFusion 4.5 UltraDev 4 Studio
Hardware: Three Compaq Proliant DL380, Cisco Local Director
Database vendor: Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Size of database: 1 to 3GB
Internet connection: 2 x 5 MB connections
Development team: One project manager, one business analyst, one technology architect, two developers, one test analyst.
Site traffic: Extranet has been tested to handle up to 1000 concurrent connections and up to 10,000 unique visitors a week.
Macromedia Services: Training, Developer Resources—Online Developer Communities
Third party products: MS Windows OS, MS SQL Server 2000, MS IIS 5

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