WORK

Digital Music CMS

Client

Market-leading mobile phone manufacturer and provider of online digital music services.

Problem

The client provides white-label online music services for a number of international customers. The catalogue contains over 2 million tracks, each with their own territorial, licensing and format restrictions.

With a growing number of customers, keeping the content fresh, relevant and exciting was beginning to overwhelm the editorial department. The problem was compounded by each client having different branding, page layouts, syndication offerings and content preferences.

Solution

Codebrain was engaged to discuss the various challenges in more detail. Through these discussions a common understanding of the problem domain and subsequent vocabulary evolved. This was crucial in avoiding ambiguities and also helped clarify an initial mental-model of the solution.

We initiated an agile development approach, enabling rapid feedback on regular software releases. This allowed the client to take advantage of opportunities that naturally arose as the sophistication of the software increased. This lead to the implementation of some more advanced features and an improved content workflow.

In our role as total solution provider we undertook:

  • Business analysis
  • Requirements gathering
  • On-site stakeholder liaison
  • Technical documentation
  • Software development
  • Integration with existing business systems
  • Infrastructure recommendations
  • Ongoing system monitoring
  • Maintenance

The delivered solution comprises of a web application with sophisticated back-office system and a windows application for authoring templates using a custom markup.

Web Application
ODS Web Application
  • Custom Content Management Interface
    • Catalogue Search
    • Content Verification
    • Publishing Configuration
    • Partner Configuration
    • Template Management
    • Publishing Scheduler
  • Reporting
    • Publishing History
    • Territorial Filtering
    • Rights Holder Reporting
    • Scheduled Quality Assurance Checks
  • Roles Authentication

Back-Office System
  • Asyncronous Messaging Infrastructure
  • Integration With External Business Systems
  • Windows Services
  • E-mail Notifications
  • Windows Authentication & Roles
Windows Application
Template Editor
  • Custom Templating Engine
  • Intellisense
  • Code Completion
  • Realtime Preview
  • Template Validation
  • Error Reporting

Technologies

C# 2.0, VB.NET 2.0, ASP.NET WebForms, WinForms, Generics, Reflection, SQL Server 2000/2005, MSMQ, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, AJAX, NVelocity, NUnit, Xceed Compression Utilities, Spreadsheet Gear, RSS.NET, ASPNet E-mail, ASPTreeview.

Outcome

The delivered solution has completely revolutionised the throughput and responsiveness of the editorial team. Tasks that would often take days can now be completed in minutes.