With the tagline “Get. Give. Grow.,”
Soloso is evolving to facilitate these
types of exchanges. Still in its early
growth phase, the site publishes about
BUILDING A PLATFORM FOR SHARING
A responsive Web content management system is helping members of
the American Institute of Architects
(AIA) keep pace with communications and collaboration trends in the
architecture profession. Last year, the
AIA launched an ambitious Web site
called Soloso ( www.soloso.aia.org)
with the long-range goal of providing an online community to address
architectural-profession trends known
as integrated practice management and
integrated project delivery. These practices are becoming widely accepted
within the design and construction
industry as the most-efficient methods
for planning and delivering building
projects. The complexity of today’s
building projects requires that core
project team members—including the
client, architects, engineers, construction companies, and others—connect
at the earliest stages. This allows
them to collaboratively develop plans
and identify problems that otherwise
might not become apparent until
well into the construction phase,
when changes would be significantly
more expensive.
86,000 items, ranging from blogs and When the AIA decided to build an online destination for architects, the organization needed a system that could
profiles of AIA members to digital handle images, graphics, documents of every format type, Web pages, and architectural models, says Kevin
architectural photos, renderings of Novak, vice president of integrated Web strategy and technology, AIA.
buildings, and PowerPoint presentations. The site also pub- could use it as an archive and quickly find the content that
lishes AIA-branded content written by association officials was most relevant to them,” he says.
as well as content created by the general membership. The User feedback about Soloso has been enthusiastic. “Many
site draws about 2,700 regular participants, a number that’s people who are aware of its content and functionality say
growing by about 11 percent a month. they’ll come to Soloso to see what content the AIA offers
Behind the scenes, Oracle Universal Content Management before they search the Web or make a phone call to find
provides the building blocks for Soloso’s content repository. information,” he says.
“Our requirement was for a system that could handle images, The user base will expand exponentially in late 2008 when
graphics, documents of every format type, Web pages, and the AIA opens access to the full site content beyond the AIA
architectural models,” says Kevin Novak, vice president of membership. To drive traffic, Novak will publish some Soloso
integrated Web strategy and technology at the AIA. Files of material on various social networking sites, where millions of
building models are particularly difficult to manage. “The files items tagged “architecture” now reside.
have many dependencies, so we needed to manage ‘parent’ Because the AIA anticipated continuing growth for Soloso
files and the ‘child’ files underneath in order to deliver the from the start, the organization created a scalable infrastructure
full models,” he adds. around it. Oracle Database acts as the underlying data reposi-
Another key for the AIA is support for metadata indexing, tory. Seven servers at an offsite location power the system and
which Oracle Universal Content Management provides. “We provide redundancy for high availability. “Our vision was that
wanted an intelligent structure behind the Web site so people there will be very heavy usage and very high user participa-
