The largest Olympic Games in history opened in Sydney last week prompting an unprecedented demand for access to accurate and timeous information by athletes, officials and fans.
"A solution was called for that would let Olympic officials enter information quickly and easily, validate its accuracy and then distribute it to the Olympic community and the outside world," says Lesego Tlhabanelo, marketing communications manager at Lotus Development SA.
The enormous amount of traffic expected during the height of the Sydney 2000 Games and the dynamic nature of Games information required a solution, such as Lotus Notes and Domino, ensuring a powerful and reliable communications infrastructure.
This included:
INFO, a self-service Lotus Domino-based intranet system that delivers on-the-spot information to the entire Olympic Family, simply and easily, and transfers it to the Official Sydney 2000 Olympic Games Web site (
www.olympics.com
) using the replication capabilities of Lotus Domino. The E-mail functions of INFO are provided by the Lotus Notes Mail client;
Olympics.com, the only destination on the Web providing official, comprehensive, real-time results and statistics and offering merchandise for sale. "Lotus Domino Release 5 is used to manage news, photo and both static content elements (such as sports information and athlete biographies) and interactive applications, including feedback, guestbook, and e-mail," says Tlhabanelo;
The IBM FanMail Web site (
www.ibm.com/fanmail
), which lets fans from around the world send "good luck" and "congratulations" messages to Olympic athletes or their teams. A Lotus Notes publishing application is used to compile and generate updated site content, with user feedback stored in a Lotus Notes database; and
The Technology Command Centre (TCC), which provides the central help desk and monitors technology operations and data processing for the Sydney 2000 Games. Problems are logged in using a system based on Lotus Notes.
Additional software applications include IBM`s AIX, DB2 Universal Database, IBM HTTP Server, WebSphere Application Server Advanced, WebSphere Performance Pack, Net.Commerce, IBM HotMedia and Tivoli Enterprise Solutions, all residing on IBM RS/6000 SP servers.
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