Project: Press Release Management

	Press Releases Page

Organization

Interactive Intelligence*, a manufacturer of business interaction management software for contact centers, enterprises, and service providers.

Project Description

Interactive Intelligence was making news and generating press releases on a regular basis. Adding new press releases to the web site manually was a time-consuming process that had to be handled by technical staff familiar with HTML. In addition, because of time constraints and scheduling conflicts, several hours could pass between the time a press release went out over the news wire services and the time it was displayed on the site. Managing the large archive of previous press releases was a nightmare, and employees were being notified of new releases via e-mail messages containing large Microsoft Word file attachments which put a strain on servers and remote users.

	Individual Release

Solution

Paul Woods developed a solution that dramatically eased the burden of publishing and managing press releases. A press release management system was created that included the following features:

• Non-technical Marketing Communications staff members could add, edit, publish and delete press releases via web-based forms.
• Press releases could be pre-loaded and scheduled for publication at a specified time, allowing them to be displayed on the web site at the same time they crossed the wire services.
• All press releases were displayed with a consistent look and feel, all the way back to the company's first release. Future formatting changes would be applied to all releases instantly and automatically.
• Archived releases were easy for users to navigate, find, and display with automatic pagination being applied as the list of releases was generated.
• Users were able to generate a printer-friendly version of each release.
• Employees were automatically notified of new press releases the moment they were released via a nicely-formatted, lightweight HTML e-mail message that was also ideal for forwarding to the company's partners and customers.

	Press Release E-Mail

The press release management system was developed using a combination of Active Server Pages, a SQL Server 2000 database, scheduled Windows scripts, and an ActiveX e-mail component.

Current Site

Interactive Intelligence Press Releases

* Unless otherwise noted, projects at Interactive Intelligence were performed by Paul Woods as a full-time employee of the company. See Paul's resume for details.