Client Background
Given the expanding network of client and supplier organizations, the goal was to create a secure Internet-based asset distribution system. The solution required three parts:

• An administrative site that could manage the distribution of assets between supplier and client organizations. Invoicing and management of organizations is also handled through the site.
• A supplier site from which registered suppliers can upload assets into the database.
• Two client "channel" sites – client organizations with access to these channels (Paparazzi and Red Carpet respectively) would have access to published assets. Said assets are published either to a client by a lightbox, or published to the channel itself. (Other methods of distribution include e-mail and FTP.)

A key business requirement was being able to upload large batches of assets simultaneously. Given that suppliers were known to upload sets of at least 100 assets, the distribution system needed to be able to process a large number of assets with minimal time delay.

A second business requirement involved security. The client "channel" pages would need security implemented to ensure that unauthorized users could not obtain the assets. Unauthorized users could not be allowed to download the assets on display neither by page functionality nor right-clicking on the images.

Finally, data integrity was required across all sites involved. A single database would store all relevant information – user information, assets, etc – and thus strict functionality was required to ensure that a failure on one sight would not migrate across all sites.

Seamless Development Solution
One of the requirements of asset management was being able to edit and rewrite metadata on to the asset photographs. To do this, Seamless Development incorporated the use of Atalasoft DotImage. This product allowed for users to grab, edit, and replace the metadata on uploaded JPEG files.

To handle such a large project, the following we met areas:

• Build the all (3) websites using ASP.NET and C#
• Develop the XML API calls used by both Flash objects to interact with the databases
• Upload and distribution processes.

A majority of the solution was built without the Flash objects in use. Seamless Development built an integrated business logic layer and data access layer that could be applied to all of the sites in turn.

This implementation allowed for the same functionality to exist across all of the solution’s sites – errors in functionality could be corrected and the layer objects (.dll files) could be re-uploaded to sites without requiring a complete re-uploading of a site or sites.