A new portal to support the management of advertising spaces

An important Publishing Group was supported by Technology Reply to improve and enhance the portal’s functions to manage the company’s advertising space. The project involves re-engineering existing functions and developing new features.

The portal is intended for agents selling advertising space in the group’s newspapers. The portal contains full details of the newspapers’ targets and enables users to manage the advertising space sold and details of customers and subscriptions.

The portal is easy to use thanks to a web application which the sales force can customise according to their own needs and preferences, and which was developed in “Oracle Java Container” and protected by “Oracle Single Sign On” to ensure the safety and confidentiality of information.

The portal contains a public area, based on “Oracle Portal 10g” technology, complete with a news section and information about advertising rates for each title.

In brief, the new functions developed by Technology Reply include:

• An application for sending messages and news to the sales force, which can be integrated into “Oracle Portal” via Portlet pl/sql;
• A series of dynamic reports displaying company organisation charts and providing paging functions via Portlet pl/sql, again integrated in Oracle Portal;
• Graphical indicators which help highlight the turnover trend of every salesperson. These functions were created with “Java Open Source” libraries and integrated into “Oracle Portal” via Java Portlet;
• Integration of Data Warehouse into “Oracle Portal” based on “Oracle Discoverer” which was updated for the occasion;
• Automatic alert functions with messages sent to sales agents via the portal and by e-mail. These functions were created with the assistance of the Business Process component, aimed at order management, profiling the “Oracle Portal” content management and activating a workflow process for approval of information before publication.

In order to update and guarantee the safety of the entire system’s Oracle components, significant software upgrade interventions were also carried out.