 |
|
|
|
Background
Academic Press, a division of Harcourt Brace, is one of the largest commercial publishers in the United States for scientific information, and is known throughout the international scientific community. Founded in 1906 they have continued to grow and currently publish over 175 scientific journals along with related books and encyclopedias.
Situation
When manuscripts are submitted through the editorial offices they pass through several reviews and edits. Then manuscripts are grouped to form issues within Journals. The journal must then be tracked through the production process. Editors needed a way to track and manage this review and production process.
Academic Press contacted SCG to help automate and track the editorial and production of these journals and books on a
worldwide basis. One of the chief requirements of the application was to support offices in San Diego, New York, Boston,
Chicago, Orlando, Tokyo, Cambridge, London and Sydney from a central database using a Virtual Private Network on the Internet.
SCG proposed a multi-tier application that would take advantage of Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft Transaction Server,
ActiveX Data Objects and Remote Data Services. This approach would isolate business logic in one area of the system where it
could be more easily maintained and reused for other applications. Additionally, scalability would not be an issue when it
came to a global deployment.
Solution
The journal management solution was segmented into three major architectural components: the Data Services reside in Microsoft
SQL Server, the Business Services Internet Information Server (IIS) and Visual Basic DLLs. The User Services (presentation layer)
is currently developed using Visual Basic, however, the middle tier supports various HTML clients.
Using ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) as the foundation for all data access, the application makes use of Microsoft's OLE DB.
Record sets are marshaled to the client services via the Remote Data Services (RDS) capabilities of ADO. Using RDS allows
for high-performance data access on both the Internet and intranets.
Results
As a result, management has more comprehensive reporting capabilities. Progress for all journals across worldwide offices
can now be tracked and managed. With the consolidation of editorial data into one central repository, collaboration can
take place among worldwide offices. Additionally, the data is in a much more stable and scalable environment.
|
|
|
|
|
| challenges |
|
|
|
|
multiple locations |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
multi-tier application requirement |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
detailed project tracking |
|
|
|
| technologies |
|
|
|
|
SQL Server |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Visual Basic |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
.NET framework |
|
|
|
| results |
|
|
|
|
comprehensive reporting |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
worldwide tracking |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
data consolidation |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
stable, scalable environment |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
