Renowned for its journalistic excellence and standard-setting news, information, and cultural programming, NPR serves a growing audience of nearly 15 million Americans each week via more than 644 public radio stations. NPR Online brings hourly newscasts, news features, commentaries, and live events to internet users through original online reports, audio streaming, and other multimedia elements.

The Business Challenge

The core business challenge at NPR was to develop an online shop in time for the 2000 Holiday shopping season, which was six-weeks from the project start date. The business plan called for all products sold on the site to have NPR logos. NPR would leverage its loyal audience base to generate revenue. Not only did the project have a short timeframe, the budget was quite limited as well. McFadyen Solutions's challenge, as the sole integrator, was to customize Dynamo's out-of-box commerce features to provide all the required functionality to deploy the site to a robust operational environment and validate end-to-end transactions from order to fulfillment, within strict time and resource constraints.

The Return on Investment

The site was operational and live within 6 weeks of project start (just in time for the holidays) - all goals for functionality were fully met. NPR has experienced a high volume since the site launch and customers are enjoying the ability to purchase NPR branded merchandise.

The Technology

Prior to launching the online store, technical experts from McFadyen Solutions worked with NPR to define the goals and strategy for the site and then architected the technical solutions to achieve defined goals. McFadyen Solutions led members of the NPR web team through a customized methodology that spans the strategic, technical, and creative disciplines. This approach is designed to define core strategic goals, closely manage project scope, and craft an architecture suited to the business objectives.

Determined Objectives for Site Features

• Dynamic catalog administration
• Credit card transactions
• Integration and communication of sales and order data with a fulfillment house
• Storewide discounts
• Inventory management
• Tax calculation
• Secure personal information management
• New creative and graphic design on site

Ultimately, the development of the online store had four phases. The first three involved the technical construction of site components such as customer service tools, catalog management tools, and order processing functionality. During the fourth phase of development, McFadyen Solutions created a new look and feel for the NPR online presence.

NPR Online Store Architecture

The site runs on a SUN ES450 with 2 GB RAM and two 400 MHz CPUs with Sun Solaris 5.6 as the operating system. The site incorporates Netscape Enterprise Web server 3.6, an Informix Dynamic Server 2000 9.20 as the Database server, and i.Sell 2.00 JC2 as the Dynamo Server, which requires Informix JDBC driver version 2.10. All system software runs on the same machine. i.Sell 2.00 JC2 is based on the following ATG software version: Dynamo 4.5.1 patch 1, DPS 4.5.1, and DCS 4.5.1. Informix added some extra functions to this package, such as inventory and order history management. Two Dynamo instances are running and they each back up the other's session information.