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Vignette Content Management Powers Athens Olympics Web Site to Capture the Gold
Following the historic and triumphant ATHENS 2004 Olympic Games, Vignette Corp., member of the consortium that worked for the event's official Web site, http://www.athens2004.com, announced that the project was tremendously successful with athletes, spectators and sports fans by providing up-to-date information about the games, including real-time results.
With Vignette's robust and scalable content management and content integration solutions, the ATHENS 2004 Web site handled massive amounts of real-time information, effectively integrating all the live result feeds generated by the Olympic events along with official final results, schedules of events and background on the sporting disciplines. The site also features a list of attending countries and useful details regarding transport and accommodation facilities, a guide to the historical monuments of the city, and a section devoted to children, offering games and an overview of the sporting personalities and history of the Olympics.
With Vignette(R) content management solutions, the Athens Olympic Committee was able to manage 100 percent of its content, easily and efficiently changing the layout of pages, instantly posting competition results, publishing press releases, updating venue information, and communicating schedule changes without external support or programming. Throughout the games, the site was able to manage more than 100,000 distinct Web pages in each of the three languages (English, French and Greek), with 9,000 distinct information channels for segmented audiences, more than 21,000 pieces of news, 3,800 event results (contained on more than 8,000 pages), 40,000 athlete biographies, more than 7,500 photographs, and 45,000 static files such as images and PDF files of event locations, etc.
Through the duration of the games, the United States visited the site the most. After the United States, Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom rounded out the top five. Citizens of the host country, Greece, visited the site sixth most frequently.
"For much of August, the world was focused on Athens, and although many of us were unable to travel to Greece to enjoy the games in person, the Vignette-powered site has helped spread the excitement and drama of competition across the globe," said Gonzalo Usandizaga, vice president and general manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa at Vignette. "The success of the ATHENS 2004 Olympic Games site is a true testament of the scalability and breadth of Vignette information management and delivery solutions."
Launched in December 2003, the ATHENS 2004 Olympic Games Web site is integrated with all the live result feeds generated by the Olympic events, ensuring that visitors have access to the final results within minutes of the completion of the event, making it by far the fastest place to find the most current results. The feed for real-time information provided up-to-the-second information about ongoing events, peaking at as many as 20 updates from different information feeds per second. The feed for official information provided final results for all the sports within minutes of the completion of each event.
OTEnet, a leading Greek Internet and IP services provider, was the project manager and responsible for the development, hosting and operation of the official Web site of the Olympic Games, ATHENS 2004. The project requirements, the application specification and acceptance, and the content operation were run by the ATHOC Internet team. Vignette's robust and scalable content management platform was implemented in conjunction with the company's prime partner, Greek Geeks (FDS Building Your Web) and a local consortium including Delta Singular for application development, supported by Vignette Professional Services. Key requirements included real-time integration with ATOS Origin for sports results feeds, and Akamai for the content delivery network. This enabled the ATHENS 2004 Web site to handle a large amount of content and information and to effectively support intense peaks of traffic, so that anyone who wanted to access information found the site ready and available. To date the site has scaled to manage more than 800 million page views in three languages, with peaks of 53 million page views in a single day several times during the games' duration. Key results from high-profile events were consistently available in under three minutes.
"The Athens 2004 Summer Olympic Games were an unqualified success by any measure, from the level of sportsmanship and competition during the events to the performance and availability of the official Web site, www.Athens2004.com," said Haris Thomadakis, general manager at the Greek Geeks. "Realizing the importance and magnitude of the official Olympic Games Web site in today's always-connected world, Greek Geeks pulled together a consortium of the world's best technology vendors to ensure that the site could scale to meet the anticipated huge volume of incoming traffic. Before, during and after the games, Vignette has delivered." 08.09.2004, Vignette Corp.
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