Functional Summary:

• A comprehensive range of information on financial services covering IPO's and bonds to mutual funds, to credit cards to loans, to stock and money market analysis and soon, online trading.
  
• Its customers with the most up to date business and financial news from around the world.
  
• Aims at building an online community of people by providing news & information specific to the interests groups via personalization features.
  

Since financial Information is dynamically changing and originating around the clock, effective Content management is a key survival factor for Home trade.

Workbench - The Home Trade Content Publishing Tool
(Integrated Web Based Content Management)

Why Content Management Is Important
One of the keys to the success of any content portal is to present fresh, consistent, high quality content to customers. Therefore, effective content management processes are essential for better customer retention. Inefficient, broken, or inconsistent content management processes drive production costs up.

Managing content is one of the biggest challenges facing companies that have businesses on the Web. First of all, most content developers are functional experts and not programmers and hence, are not familiar with development tools. Second, large portal Web sites can consist of hundreds of thousands of pages. Third, the popularity of the Web has attracted an extremely broad range of content dissemination.

The requirements of an effective Content management solution are:

• Ability to handle content throughout its life cycle.
  
• Must enable different types of users/creators to modify the content, with appropriate levels of control.
  
• Must cope with quickly locating and revising nearly every imaginable form of information (e.g.,text, structured data/text & images).
  

Our solution was to devise a very simple and intuitive content management tool called Workbench which demands only the very basic computer skills from the people in charge of the editing - the ability to maneuver the mouse and cut and paste.

Workbench has an easy-to-use, browser-based interface with Integration to standard authoring tools & Web-based templates for content contribution. It allows creation and modification of templates. It is a tool created that will allow HomeTrade's Publishing Team that involves one or many authors and moderators or contributors to put up News & section links update to the site simultaneously. Workbench enables publishers and other content experts in the organization to create, edit, and approve web-based content without needing to have any knowledge of web programming. Today, their team of editors/sub editors is able to publish over hundreds of pages within a few hours time.

Thus enabling content management on the Web, Workbench empowers non-technical users to create Web content without requiring them to understand HTML or XML. With respect to functional requirements, Workbench

• Enables easy modification and customization of content.
  
• Offers interfaces and/or support for development and modification of the individual Web pages and their constituent elements (e.g., text, tables, graphics).
  
• Accommodates templates and related mechanisms intended to support the dynamic creation of HTML pages.
  

Technology:
JSP, Java Beans, XML, JavaScript, Oracle8i & Html.
News Site Scenario - A Case Study

The goal of a news site, such as http://www.hometrade.com, is to provide timely and accurate news articles presented in an attractive and easily accessible manner. News articles, the primary product of the site consists of text, images. Once the decision has been made to cover a particular "story, and after gathering enough details, the author/reporter decides on the right "angle" and writes the news article.
Keeping in mind that timeliness is paramount, there are also other related activities happening concurrently that support the publishing of the story. These tasks include acquiring and editing supporting images for the story. Once these assets are reviewed and approved, a publisher heads determines the best way to present all of the various elements as a news/articles on the Web.

To conclude, Workbench can provide tremendous upside for an organization. In today's e-business economy, where the age and value of information is determined in minutes, you need the ability to not only produce output faster but also work smarter. As the Web is increasingly becoming the primary distribution media for information, your organization needs a system in place to leverage the value of your information and to exploit the efficiencies gained from the collaborative creation, management, assembly, and delivery of content and content collections.

Technical Summary:
Innasite has done the design & development of the Hometrade Financial Portal. The development took into account the huge volume of content to be displayed and also which will increase in future. The complete web application is content driven and supported by a full-fledged content management tool enabling the Hometrade Publishing team to change and publish news and other information on real-time basis.

The architecture was designed using Java Technologies. The application is built using the Java Beans, JSP & Oracle8i as the backend database. The development team executed the project working in sync with the Hometrade Business & Technical Heads.

Technical Snapshot
Web Server : iPlanet 4.1
Deployment : Sun Solaris 8
Technologies : JSP, Java Beans, XML
Operating system : Sun Solaris 8
Database : Oracle 8i Design HTML, DHTML and Dreamweaver/Frontpage

The hardware architecture is composed of two separate server configurations one each for the web server and the Oracle 8i database.