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.