Organization Background
Founded in 1977 and headquartered in Pittsburgh, USA, Black
Box Corporation is the world's largest technical services company
dedicated to designing, building and maintaining today's complicated
network infrastructure systems. Black Box services clients of all
sizes in 132 countries throughout the world. Black Box UK was set
up in 1988 and they are the company’s largest subsidiary outside
of the USA. The Project
When the Black Box Catalogue first rolled off the presses in
early 1977, it had just 6 pages, containing 9 products and it generated
$170,000 in sales. In 1990, the catalogue had just over 145 pages
with 500 products. Today, the latest Black Box Catalogue, an enormous 800-page
book, features more than 10,000 products and has international versions
published in 8 languages.
The objective for the Black Box Catalogue is to create a central,
reliable source for hard-to-find products and technical skill. The
catalogue continues to expand every year by a rate of 20% and contains
product specifications, application information, and the latest information
about leading edge technologies.
With the advent of the Internet and e-commerce, Black Box launched
the Black Box On-Line Catalogue created to reach an even broader
audience, increase market share, and quickly introduce new products
to the marketplace. The Challenge
The Black Box On-Line Catalogue has websites located in over
15 countries around world which are each managed locally. With no
centralized application to manage the data, maintaining updated
product information became an almost impossible task. Information
about prices, descriptions and codes were often wrong or became obsolete
because online catalogues could not be updated in real-time. In
some cases, even the printed version of the catalogue had more accurate
information than the on-line version.
The idea of re-designing and standardizing the Pan-European websites
and their content management tools originated in the UK offices
in 2003. Time-to-market and budget constraints were important administrative challenges
faced by developers at Black Box UK. On the product side, multi-criteria
sorting, flexible indexes, PDF support, dynamic indexing and scalability
were some of the essential features needed in the new e-catalogue solution. The Solution
After analyzing and evaluating several possibilities, including
managing the catalogue content using off-the-shelf e-catalogue solutions,
software engineers decided that a native XML content server would
best suit their needs.
The decision was taken to create a
custom-made content management solution, centralized in the UK, capable
of feeding the catalogue content efficiently throughout multi-lingual
European websites. Catalogue administrators would, from now on,
populate the online catalogue entries strictly with XML content
instead of the old static HTML pages.
Architecture
of Black Box On-Line Catalogue
By standardizing on XML - separating the content from the
presentation - administrators would now be able to easily maintain
the centralized database and provide localized websites with updated
information.
As a result, TEXTML Server is the central repository where
all catalogue entries (XML content), digital images, and PDF files
are stored. By having a centralized system, the cost is shared across
the different European facilities making the total cost of acquisition
very attractive. Results & Benefits
Both Black Box UK and end-users are benefiting from the
implementation of TEXTML Server at the heart of their on-line catalogue
solution. Driving More Revenue
Because the
content management solution developed by Black Box fully exploits
the XML structure of documents, it now represents a new source of
revenue since it recommends the purchase of additional or related
products. For instance, in addition to posting the search results
as queried by the user, Black Box is able to propose complementary
products related to or in the same category as the posted results.
Black Box UK website
Advanced Searching
End-users are
provided with advanced searching capabilities enabling them to find
precise information quickly. Searches can be performed using multi-criteria such
as product name, code, full-text description, and category grouping. Other results and benefits
- Fast development
time (easily accessible APIs)
- Centralized content management in the UK
- Catalogue updates instantly pushed to localized websites (dynamic
indexing)
- Shared content management cost across regional websites
- Advanced searching capabilities for better end-user experiences
About TEXTML Server
TEXTML Server is a native XML database and search engine
whose purpose is to store, index and retrieve XML content. It is
the first embeddable XML server for OEMs and developers of XML applications.
It was designed as an OEM product to build document-centric XML
applications, such as web content management systems, knowledge
management, or digital asset management systems where the content
consists mostly of rich semi-structured information. The key advantages
of TEXTML Server include the ability to combine full-text and metadata
search, speed of execution, schema independence, ease of integration, and
aggressive OEM-geared pricing model.
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