The magic of Google: I just stumbled upon an interview I did last year for ContentManagement365.com, about the implementation of the Athens2004 Olympics Web Site… Unfortunately, the site requires registration, but the article found its way into Google’s cache. Here’s the link to the interview: And the Gold medal goes to … Vignette! Just because I don’t want it to get lost, I’m going to paste the whole interview in the extended entry as well :-)
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And the Gold medal goes to … Vignette!
ECM and enterprise software corporation Vignette takes the gold medal in the race to build Athens Olympic website
With about ten weeks to go the stadium may be half finished, the physical event security may be in pieces, but at least the organisers of the 2004 Athens Olympics know that their website is up and running courtesy of enterprise software company Vignette.
ECM365 wanted to know more about how the background to this prestigious project so we interviewed project leader Thomas Conte, delivery manager for Vignette Professional Services Athens2004.com
First of all, tell me about your role in Vignette’s Olympic project, how big a project has this been?
I am the Delivery Manager in charge of coordinating Vignette Professional Services at the Athens2004 site. The high visibility and tight deadlines of the project made it necessary to have a team of four Vignette experts on site at all times in order to support our local partner, Greek Geeks, and the main contractor for the overall project, OTEnet. The project started in October 2003, and will end after the Paralympic Games, on September 30, 2004. The complexity and pace of the project also required us to build a virtual team spanning the globe, including Vignette Professional Services (VPS) resources from Asia-Pacific and architects from our engineering department, back in the headquarters in Austin, Texas.
Winning this project must have been highly competitive, how was Vignette selected for the contract, and when?
Vignette was bidding against very high caliber competitors. We won the tender by presenting a best-of-breed robust architecture, including IBM WebSphere and DB2, Microsoft Windows OS and Web Server, and integration with the Akamai Content Delivery Network for scalability. Vignette’s strong track record in information management and delivery was a key differentiator.
What was the biggest challenge in making the site?
People often think of Olympic website challenges in terms of the traffic generated on the site. However, there is another, less obvious challenge: the amount and complexity of the data that must be processed in order to decode, reformat and display real-time results originating from sporting events. Various technology providers send the feeds, for different purposes (e.g. official vs. real-time information), and each feed has a different format and semantics. The total throughput can peak at 20 messages persecond, most of them requiring complex processing to generate the final result page. The XML capabilities of our Vignette Content Management Solution (VCM) matched perfectly the sophisticated messaging technology used to transmit result feeds, and allowed us to easily and rapidly receive, transform and deploy result messages.
And what was the biggest headache, if any?
At the beginning of the project, The Athens Olympic Committee (ATHOC) was using a home-grown Content Management System (CMS) which was creaking at the edges. Both the CMS and the live site had frequent outages, sometimes several times per day. They wanted to switch to the Vignette infrastructure as fast as possible, with no downtime, and automatically migrate the 50,000 content items it had in its old CMS to Vignette to avoid inefficient manual data entry.
Vignette’s open standards-based Business Integration Studio (BIS) was key to migrate ATHOC’s legacy data from SQL Server and file system repositories into the VCM, and transform semi-structured content into fully structured content entirely managed by the VCM.
However, the three-month period of the initial site design, implementation and launch was extremely fast-paced, and the work was made more complex by the fact that the design already had to take into account the future requirements of the Games-time site, especially regarding performance.
How big will the site get? How are your systems set up to cope with the issue of scalability?
At the end of the Games, we expect we will have about 500,000 content items under management, and more than one million pages. Although these are extreme numbers, the high scalability of the VCM makes it easy to grow the infrastructure to the required level. The Games-time VCM will be installed on a cluster of three quad-CPU servers, and the content stored into a 16-CPU DB2 cluster. The clustering and load-balancing capabilities of the VCM will ensure the load is evenly spread among the machines, and allow us to add more servers at any time if necessary.
The number of people coming to view the site is surely going to be very large. What volume of traffic will the Olympic website be able to take? What are the issues here?
ATHOC is designing the system so it can handle peaks of 100,000,000 page views per day, which is close to the world record still held by the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic sites. This extreme throughput requires a gigantic network architecture that ATHOC felt would be near-impossible to build in Greece. However, it still wanted to be in control of its platform and required the platform to be hosted in Greece, as with the rest of the Olympic infrastructure.
ATHOC decided to purchase services from Akamai in order to cope with this traffic: the origin servers will indeed be hosted in Greece, but Akamai will then distribute the content to end-users all over the world.
Vignette’s VCM flexible, robust deployment capabilities were key to integrate the website with the Akamai solution: although the VCM usually manages dynamic content, it can also easily pre-generate static content (HTML pages) and deploy it out to the Akamai network, where it will be served to end-users.
A lot of the physical infrastructure for the actual Olympics is not finished yet, so presumably a lot of the information the site needs to contain is not available. How quickly can the site be updated once the information becomes available? Will the Olympic website be ready on time?
In the few months before every Olympic Games, the host country is required to organise official competitions in all the Olympic disciplines in the venues that will actually be used during the Games, as a form of dress rehearsal before the real thing. As part of these Sports Events, the live results infrastructure is being tested as well, and the updates are already being sent to the website and displayed in the Sport Events section.
ATHOC is also using the website as its primary channel to communicate organisational announcements, which is crucial since a lot of the infrastructure and processes are still being put in place. For example, the website was used to communicate detailed plans about the special traffic arrangements around the competition venues and to organise the recruitment of more than 50,000 volunteers.
Will there be a moment when the Olympic authorities take over the running of the site, or will Vignette be in charge while the games are in progress?
ATHOC has been in full control of the website since Day One. It can manage 100% of its content without any external help or programming. It can easily and efficiently change the layout of pages, publish press releases, update venue information, send newsletters to subscribers, highlight important news, manage volunteer applications, and communicate schedule changes, entirely from Vignette’s Content Management Console. ATHOC’s staff can edit every single piece of content that appears on the website, from the home page’s latest news to the copyright statement.
How dynamic is the system you are putting in place, how easy will it be to manipulate the look and feel of individual pages?
ATHOC wanted to have full control of the layout of its website, in particular the home page and the section home pages. Dedicated Content Types have been designed to control the elements appearing on the home pages: latest news, highlights, FAQs, teasers pointing to highlighted sections of the site, picture of the day, etc. Home pages are complex objects, but using the VCM, ATHOC can manage them without any programming.
The internal pages, depending on the nature of the information, are implemented either as free-form HTML managed using a WYSIWYG editor from within the VCM, or as structured content that is being formatted using layouts and templates.
Will the site be able to carry live feed from different sporting events?
The site will be integrated with all the live result feeds generated by the Olympic events. The feed for official information, a.k.a. INFO, will provide final results for all the sports within minutes of the completion of each event. The feed for real-time information, CIS, will provide up-to-the-second information about ongoing events. Both of the feeds will be managed by the VCM for tracking and deployment to the Akamai network, and will allow ATHOC to make manual corrections if necessary.
As a high-profile site, the system will surely be a target for attacks of all kinds? How secure is it? Have you done anything differently for such a high profile launch?
Protecting the site from attacks is one of our primary design goals: all the previous Olympics sites have been targets for denial of service (DoS) attacks, and Athens2004 will be no exception. Vignette has integrated the VCM platform with Akamai’s SiteShield solution, which helps provide complete isolation of the Athens2004 website from external attacks: instead of being served by ATHOC’s infrastructure directly, the pages will be pushed out to Akamai’s network, where they will be served to the end-users.