ANP News Server & News Archive

ANPThe ANP (Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau) has a key role in the Dutch language news media, with clients that include newspapers, radio and TV broadcasters, government agencies, ambassadors, service providers, and many international companies.

The ANP gathers news from a variety of sources, including international press feeds, as well as correspondents located in the Netherlands and worldwide. Their editorial teams create a continuous stream of news bulletins, images, video and audio, publishing more than 120,000 international and local news items each years.

ANP and the InternetSince the arrival of the Internet, the ANP has provided a range of new online services, distributing real-time news to their customers, and satisfying the demand for new e-products. Two of the first Internet services they produced were the ANP News Server and the Archive Server – both of which were designed and developed on their behalf by The Bright Side of Life. These subscriber services provided users with instant access to all the news and financial information produced by the ANP, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

News Server‘Old news is no news’ applies to everyone in the online news industry. The ANP is no exception, with a host of important

clients who demand access to complete and accurate news items as soon as possible. The ANP News Server played a key role in achieving this goal, operating around the clock, publishing news articles in real-time on the Internet so that they were online within seconds of an editor filing a story.

Subscribers chose the news categories (sports, foreign news, local news…) and how many messages they wanted to see, and the headlines for matching news items appeared instantly in their web browser. With one click they could open and read articles, or copy complete article selections to their PC. Users could also search through all the messages from the previous three months (around 30,000 items), using a range of techniques (Booleans, approximate matching, relevance ranking…) to help them find the right articles almost instantly.

Article contents, headlines, keywords, categories and dates could all be used in searches. Users could even save ‘favourite’ searches under their own personal profiles, so that they could be recalled and reused time after time.

Archive ServerThe second service we developed (the ANP Archive Server) shared the same ‘easy-to-use’ News Server interface, making it instantly familiar to News Server users. It placed online the vast wealth of articles produced by the ANP since 1987. The archive was updated daily, and contained more than one million articles, making it one of the most extensive Dutch language news sources on the web. We made use of powerful indexing and retrieval technology from Verity (now Autonomy), so that users could search the entire archive in just a few seconds, performing simple or more advanced searches.

IntegrationBoth services were linked directly to output from the ANP editorial systems, and offered flexible and intuitive interfaces, high performance, high availability, and security. ANP system managers made use of a custom management module to create and manage user accounts, and to monitor use made of their data. Statistics recorded automatically in the ANP database were regularly exported to the ANP financial management system, so that customers could be invoiced for the information they had used.

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ANP September 2011 © 2011 BSL

BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE

Established in 1992, the Bright Side of Life (BSL) is a dynamic and innovative software house located in Breukelen. Our engineers design and develop advanced Web 2.0, OS X and Windows applications, often using Oracle, Sybase and MySQL, and intelligent search and classification technology from Autonomy and Exalead. We also develop applications for mobile platforms such as the iPhone/iPad and Android.

BSL is synonymous with “flexibility and innovation”, working with the latest development technologies. This has established BSL in the rapidly changing world of Web 2.0 design and application development. You can rely on BSL to quickly deliver web or workstation solutions to meet your specifications, on the platform of your choice. We are also a supplier of advanced solutions for the management, online retrieval, publication and distribution of multimedia assets - including digital images, video, audio, illustrations, brochures (PDFs) and MS Office documents. Our unique and flexible FRS digital asset management technology can provide you and your users with secure, fast access to almost any type of digital information.

Bright Side of Life BVthe brighter side of softwareDe Corridor 21G3621 ZA Breukelentel: +31 (0)346 552700 fax: +31 (0)346 552425

email: sales@brightside.nl website: www.brightside.nl

News Server design Given the expectations of their customers, the ANP needed a reliable, flexible, and high performance solution, designed to meet their specific needs. Working together with the ANP we designed and built their application in little more than three months, using technology from Oracle and Autonomy:

• Oracleprovidestheperformance,reliability, real-time backups and security demanded by a high profile service provider. Proven technology that allows a system to be kept online 24 hours a day, and which can recover even from catastrophic network or system failures.

• AutonomyK2providesunique,intelligent indexing technology that can be used to search tens of thousands of articles for words, text fragments and concepts - within seconds.

• Ourconsultants,webdesignersand developers used their design, development and Internet expertise to produce a solution that exactly met the requirements of the ANP. Using off-the-shelf BSL modules, including technology found in our FRS digital asset management system, we were able to deliver two innovative solutions - on time, and on budget.

Reliable solution We worked closely with the ANP in order to document their needs, and to translate their commercial requirements into a completely customised system. Our unique development expertise and innovation created a tailor-made solution that was first placed online in

1999, supplying hundreds of ANP customers with news, every day of the week for over seven years. In the short life cycle of the Internet, this is a major achievement - and an important milestone in the Brighter Side of Software development.

News made-to-measure The ANP News Server and Archive Server were commercial services available directly from the ANP. Using press feeds from the ANP, Factiva, Reuters, Dow Jones, Bloomberg and others, we can deliver a completely customised solution for your own website, or your Intranet. Our news scanners can automatically import and publish IPTC, NITF, RSS and News ML (XML) messages from almost any news source, placing them online within your own website for your users or subscribers, or automatically selecting and distributing news selections to mailboxes or mobiles anywhere in the world. BSL customers making use of our automated news services include PWC, and the Financiële Dagblad.

More information?We would be pleased to arrange an appointment with you, so that you can find out more about BSL, and the services we offer. If you prefer, we can arrange a demonstration focusing on your specific requirements.

Send an e-mail to sales@brightside.nl to contact us or call (+31) (0)346 552700. You can also visit our web site for more information about BSL, our products and services, and to download our brochures. There is a complete English language web site available.