VNU Exhibitions Europe organizes exhibitions and trade fairs. I have been helping them to adapt their way of doing business to current service-oriented technology standards.

Websites in the blink of an eye

As a business analyst for Evident Interactive, he was the architect of a system that supplied VNU Exhibitions Europe with a tool to build their own web sites in a matter of minutes.

Not just a very efficient CMS, the system is also capable of coupling any other XML-driven application into its web sites. Other features included workflow possibilites, version control for all the content modules and a universal authentication service for Single Sign On.

A change of business

There is more to the system than the production of exhibition web sites. This web site generator is the core of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), in which VNU Exhibitions Europe can trace the latest administrative records while negotiating prices and availability with their customers on the internet.

To do so, a real-time, interactive map of the exhibition halls was designed in which customers can choose location and size of their preferred booth. Web services are used to track back the latest changes in the SAP administrative system, to make sure the customers have access tot the latest availability information. On the other hand, account managers use the map tool as a graphical user interface to make reservations and perform actual sales that go straight into the SAP system.

An award winning application

A tight collaboration between the two business analysts of Evident Interactive and the VNU Exhibitions Europe organization led to a succesful project, in which both technology and process were streamlined without the pain of actual business process redesign. The project won the Europrix Award 2004 and was also nominated for the ICT Awards 2004.