Metropolitan Opera Guild

The Met Needed a Better Web site 
The Metropolitan Opera Guild ran a popular Web site offering thousands of pages of information on operas and opera broadcasts, audio clips, news and teaching materials. However, the site took on a dated look after years passed without a redesign. And because information changed frequently, the Guild needed a more efficient way to administer changes and updates.

After deciding on an upgrade, they quickly found the cost—in both time and money—prohibitive. The thousands of pages of information would require a massive effort to convert. Worse, the Guild could expect to pay the same costs again during each future redesign.

TAG Online, experts in creating powerful and effective Web sites, proposed a solution easier than a complete replacement and upgrade. They built a collection of predefined, user-friendly templates that can be modified or enhanced to control various aspects of a Web page's appearance. This system of templates allows for a virtually unlimited ability to expand and make changes on the site. It also enforces consistency, simplifies enhancements and reduces the cost of maintenance. The Web pages consist of information extracted from a database.

An Enterprise Class Database Was Needed
What was needed to make this template structure work was an agile and reliable enterprise-class database to store and recall data. TAG Online quickly decided to use Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise.

"Customers such as the Metropolitan Opera Guild have complex Web sites with a lot of information that needs to be available quickly," says Amy Gideon, president of TAG Online. "Sybase excels in supporting complexity and handling a high transaction rate. We knew it would provide a good back-end to the Web sites we develop, many of which carry mission-critical applications and need to be up all the time."

Andrew Gideon, CTO/vice president of TAG Online, agreed. "In addition to Sybase ASE's ability to do transactions quickly, we have been very happy with ASE's performance, reliability, flexibility pricing and support."

Added Amy Gideon, "We've used Sybase support quite a bit and have always had friendly and fast service."
ASE's ability to safely manage data concurrence was crucial. "ASE handles multiple concurrent users very well while protecting the data," Andrew Gideon said.

For the Opera Guild, this capability ensures, first, that the site can handle multiple users downloading information on Rigoletto or Don Giovanni simultaneously. It also ensures the integrity of what the public sees—if a staff member is putting in a last-minute cast change, a user won't be able to access the page until the change is complete.

Template Structure Plus ASE Delivers Successful Site
The Sybase-powered solution offers some important advantages over the old site. First, any future redesign of the site will involve changing only a small collection of templates; even major changes become minor affairs.

A second benefit is the ease with which information can be added and existing information can be altered. Making changes to the previous site required a familiarity with the content and language, and knowledge of HTML. In the new site, all changes are made through an administrative Web application that can be accessed with a browser using the proper security login. Maintaining and adding information has become far more accessible, as neither familiarity with HTML nor any special software are required on a user's computer.

"They are able to easily make changes to its Web site, and their customers are very happy with its ease of use. It used to take them two weeks to put up a new opera—this includes English and three other languages. With Sybase ASE, they can put up a new opera with the same four languages in four to six hours," says Andrew Gideon.

Not only were the Metropolitan Opera Guild's immediate needs for a site redesign satisfied, future redesigns will be at very low cost. This permits those redesigns to be scheduled more frequently, allowing the site to stay fresh and appealing to the audience.