Quoin built a web-based advertising order management system that is used by state press associations and several thousand newspapers nationwide. Our dedicated engineering support team continues to support and enhance this critical system for distributing ads to media outlets.
Quoin has provided ongoing engineering support for the OneSystem, an advertising management platform that serves more than 10,000 newspapers and processes more than $200 million in advertising annually. This system enables press associations to offer single-order placement services to advertisers and an advertising distribution network for media outlets. The OneSystem is mission-critical for its users and requires a dedicated support team to maintain a high availability and guaranteed delivery of advertising orders.
Our initial support focused on a legacy desktop application used to create orders and send via fax to newspapers. Although used to generate significant revenue, this solution was labor-intensive and subject to communication failures, due to lost faxes and other problems. Quoin worked with OneSystem stakeholders to create a web-based system.
Our two-year scope of work included requirement specification, implementation, testing, and deployment of the new platform. In addition to defining the architecture and user experience, our project team was responsible for the test and production environments, which were initially deployed at RackSpace and later migrated to Amazon Web Services as a managed hosting provider. The user experience for OneSystem users emphasizes ready access to information, keyboard input, and other tactics suited to an operational and data-centric platform. A complete order will include the ad copy or artwork, applicable commissions and discounts, the targeted newspapers, and other data.
The technical approach was based on a three-tiered architecture:
- A persistent storage layer that uses the PostgreSQL relational database
- An application layer for order management business rules and reporting built-in Java
- A user-interface layer implemented in Dojo, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
OneSystem is in daily use by scores of media specialists and therefore has a utilitarian design that allows its users to focus on well-defined tasks. This image is an example of the application's data-centric user interface - the workflow shown is for creating an order for a specific ad agency or advertiser.
After the successful launch of the web-based platform, Quoin's role has focused on support and enhancement of the OneSystem. Specific responsibilities of our support team include the following.
- Provide second-tier user and operational support
- Manage issues and collaborate with stakeholders to prioritize our support
- Implement fixes and system enhancements
- Design and build new capabilities that enhance productivity
- Consult to stakeholders on security, availability, continuity, and other operational issues
- Recommend strategic initiatives, such as Internet-based faxing and integration with other ad platforms