The Client

The 2000 Republican National Convention, recently hosted by the City of Philadelphia, has been called the first "Internet Convention." Never before had the press, delegates, and voters been provided with real-time news, streaming media, and information with Internet speed and efficiency.

What They Wanted

A press-release distribution system that allowed the creation, editing, approval and publishing of convention press releases to a variety of points, including:

• Direct e-mail to convention "dot-com delegates" sorted by their home state and interest in various political issues.
• Publication on the media Intranet, a searchable database of press releases available only to members of the press.
• Publication on the GOP Convention 2000 public web site.

What We Provided

Working through several subcontractors, including Arthur Anderson, Tierney Digital, and IQ Group, Earl's Towing.com planned the system's technical architecture, developed the data model, the business and data logic, and integrated a provided graphical user interface. It should be noted that the foundation of the publishing system became a reusable part of subsequent IQ Group and Tierney projects.

The system was only part of a much larger RNC Internet presence. Other vendors performed the graphical design, project management and training for the RNC administrative staff.

Technologies We Employed

Earl's Towing.com developed the system to serve and store content from a database (Microsoft's SQL Server 7). To facilitate publication, we parsed the content stored in the database to static HTML and text files for distribution. We built Active Server Pages to integrate the graphical HTML front-end to the business logic contained in Microsoft Transaction Server components. To distribute content to various destinations (including a Sun/Apache web server), we used Microsoft Site Server 3.0's content deployment features.

• Microsoft Windows DNA technology
  • Internet Information Server 4.0
  • SQL Server 7.0
  • Site Server 3.0
• Visual Basic 6.0
  • MTS COM objects manage all contact with the database