Nissan North America
Nissan North America
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ColdFusion
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Headquartered in Gardena, California, Nissan North America coordinates all operations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico including automotive styling, consumer, and corporate financing and engineering.
Challenge
To create a robust and secure system for digital asset management enabling dealers, vendors, and clients to share a variety of components, including photos, logos, television spots/clips, and other branding materials.
Benefits
Project Details
"This is a great update to ColdFusion MX. When we saw the improved responsiveness in the Nissan Digital Asset Management System during the beta program, we were excited to move version 6.1 into production. Updating our servers was easy, and we're experiencing better performance and stability." Linda Kato, Manager, Advertising Creative
As a full-service print and interactive advertising agency, the seasoned team
at Eclipse Advertising, Inc. has conceived and executed diverse, award-winning
campaigns to promote some of the world's leading entertainment brands. Studios
like DreamWorks, Disney, New Line Cinema, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount
have relied on Eclipse to manage and execute the extensive print production needs
associated with motion picture promotion.
Like most agencies, in recent years, Eclipse has broadened its focus with the
Internet taking a more prominent role in how it executes campaigns. Not only is
the Web providing a new way to reach audiences, it’s also providing an operational
infrastructure for managing campaigns across all types of media.
“More than ever before advertising has become a media-asset-intensive proposition,”
explained Scott Van Vliet, Senior Technical Analyst for Eclipse. “That can
encompass EPS images, Quark files, text files of ad copy, logos, branding guidelines,
and other similar material. For example, we might need to distribute a new advertisement
to hundreds of media outlets in a few hours if a new ad campaign is breaking.”
“Previously, we’d overnight the films or videotapes of these materials
to clients for their review. Later, we switched to CDs and DVDs of those files.
That was an important improvement, because the speed and efficiency with which
we handle and manage those assets is a very large determinant of our success.”
One of Eclipse’s leading clients – automobile manufacturer Nissan
North America – has an extensive need to communicate with its thousands
of dealers. “We needed to reduce the costs and time to market of distributing
digital assets to Nissan’s extensive network of dealers,” said Van
Vliet. “Previously, it involved a binder with CD-ROMs of digital assets
sent to thousands of locations. And, of course once the materials were shipped,
it was inefficient to control, maintain and update them. “When you factor
in the multiple interfaces and platforms, it is apparent how difficult this process
had become.”
Eyeing an opportunity to improve this process, Eclipse approached Nissan with
a proposal to create an extranet Web site to distributed digital assets to its
dealer network. The first version of the Nissan Digital Asset Management System
was a static HTML site. “We used it to upload TV spots, logos, photos –
all of our client’s assets,” said Van Vliet. “It was static,
but provided instant access, which was an improvement. However, in order to fully
realize the system’s ability to distribute and communicate marketing efforts,
we needed something scalable. When new model-years arrive, there’s a tremendous
amount of asset turnover. The complexity of the old system meant that it could
take a day or two to add a digital asset – obviously that’s too slow.
And we also needed a rigorous security model. That’s when I turned to ColdFusion.”
Using Macromedia ColdFusion and Macromedia Dreamweaver, Van Vliet architected
the new version of the Nissan Digital Asset Management System in six months. The result is an enterprise digital asset management system that enables authorized
remote end-users to access Nissan digital assets from anywhere in the world.
“I’ve
always been a big fan of ColdFusion,” he said. “It’s superb
for quickly and easily building Web sites that support thousands of users. I can
quickly implement a data-driven Web application without abstracting every single
aspect of connecting to databases. Using a simple tag, I can access data on the
fly.”
New Versions of ColdFusion MX and Dreamweaver MX bring Added Power
As Macromedia releases new versions of ColdFusion and Dreamweaver, Eclipse is
poised to take full advantage. “ColdFusion MX 6.1 solidifies its position
as the best solution for Web development,” said Van Vliet. “With increased
compiler and runtime performance, ColdFusion MX 6.1 proves once again that it
is the tool of choice for rapid application development at both the professional
and enterprise levels. Enhancements to CFMAIL provide an industrial-strength tool
for high performance mail handling, including the ability for SMTP authentication
– which you can’t do in ASP.NET. And the performance improvements
are significant. Our tests on the new versions show processing times decreasing
from 2000 ms to 400 ms as well as an overall performance increase of 60-75 percent.”
Van Vliet was equally enthusiastic about Dreamweaver MX 2004. “Dreamweaver
has been a powerful IDE for writing ColdFusion, ASP, and .NET applications,”
he said. “But, now Dreamweaver MX 2004 brings all of the features that I’ve
wanted in an IDE to fruition. Code editing has never been easier with the help
of the new Code Validator that highlights invalid markup and provides detailed
error information for easy correction
“The new table-editing features make it easy to select and modify tables
and see those changes reflected instantly without touching the underlying code,”
said Van Vliet. “Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) functionality has been completely
rebuilt and provides an enhanced visualization, Design View rendering, and an
all-new CSS panel – which gives me a true image of the file I’m working
with.”
For Linda Kato, manager, advertising creative, Nissan North America, the new functionality
has a noticeable impact. “This is a great update to ColdFusion MX,”
she said. “When we saw the improved responsiveness in the Nissan Digital
Asset Management System during the beta program, we were excited to move version
6.1 into production. Updating our servers was easy, and we're experiencing better
performance and stability. Now we plan to start taking advantage of some of the
great feature enhancements like improvements to CFHTTP, Web services, and CFMAIL.”
Project Summary
Macromedia products:
Macromedia ColdFusion MX 6.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004
Hardware:
Dell PowerEdge dual-Pentium III 1.1 GHz processors with 4
GB RAM
Operating system:
Microsoft Windows 2000
Database:
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition
Size of DB:
1.2 million records consisting of 5,000-6,000 assets and 50 GB of data
Development Team:
1 developer
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