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BACKGROUND
Middle East Broadcasting Network turned to Solutrix to provide their first interactive web portal, www.radiosawa.com. Radio Sawa provides radio broadcasts to the Middle East from multiple world wide locations. They have an internal system that dictates the workflow and creation of their on air broadcast material. Solutrix developed and successfully deployed the application to interface with their broadcast system to gather the multiple data sources, text, photos, audio streams and place them on the Radio Sawa web portal. Radio Sawa provides news updates constantly throughout the day to keep their radio and web audience informed. Their web portal is constantly updated as each new article is published. The automation of the content flow from their broadcast system has increased the efficiency of their staff and allowed them to concentrate on creating the content.
The web portal solution provides for the inclusion of data from multiple third party content providers with the automation to gather the data but still give total control to Radio Sawa as to when and if that outside data is displayed.
Radio Sawa is supported by Solutrix 24x7.
REQUIREMENTS
In order to deliver news content to the selected audience, Radio Sawa needed a sophisticated web portal that would facilitate article and content entry by a team of editors and deliver these to the intended audience in an accessible format. High on the list of desired features was audio streaming, article ranking, weather, and image slideshows. Uptime and reliability were also key requirements.
IMPLEMENTATION
Solutrix worked hand in hand with Radio Sawa to interface with the existing radio station systems and allowing the editors to create new or edit existing articles. This teaming allowed the portal to go live with little interruption to the 24 x 7 publishing of news articles. The system now houses over 10,000 articles over the past years.
The hardware foundation was built with a load-balanced web farm running Windows 2000 server, IIS and MSSQL. 24x7x365 monitoring was implemented to track uptime and performance.
The frontend and backend components were developed in ASP.NET and formatted with CSS. An admin tool for the editor team was created which provided WYSIWYG editing with Arabic language support. The tool allowed for editors to easily add new articles and include links, audio streams and images. Searching, updating and deleting articles was facilitated as well. The SQL Server 2005 database was tuned to increase performance on both the frontend and backend.
RESULTS
The web portal has continued to grow in viewer traffic and now attracts more than 40,000 visitors per day from all over the world. It continues to be refined and upgraded, with new features. MBN was so pleased with the results they asked Solutrix to assist with their TV web portal www.alhurra.com. |
CLIENT PROFILE
 First broadcasting in 2002, an Arabic-language radio station funded by the U.S. government. Mission: provide world and local news to to middle-eastern countries via the internet and airwaves.
VITAL STATISTICS
§ Over 40,000 visitors per day
§ Over 10,000 per hour peak
§ Over 10,000 unique and updated articles in Arabic
§ Global user base including Morocco, Sweden, Germany, USA, France, Egypt, UK, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Italy
TECHNOLOGIES
§ .NET 2.0
§ XML
§ Web Services
§ SQL SERVER 7, 2000, 2005
§ Windows Server
§ Load-balanced web farm
§ RSS
§ Data Warehousing
§ Statistical Reporting
KEY FEATURES
§ Custom-developed CMS with support for Arabic and English
§ Audio Streaming
§ Video Streaming
§ Related Story/ranking
§ Tell a Friend
§ AFP Flash graphics
§ Image slideshows
§ Weather
§ Automated Content Import from 3rd-party sources
SCREENSHOTS
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