Case Study: Voice of America

The Voice of America is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government and broadcasts to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 100 million people.

Business Problem:
Voice of America needed a system to support the many different Voice of America Language Services throughout the world by providing them a simple way of submitting radio scripts/articles to a web-enabled content management system. This system must support many different languages and many different script formats.

Solution:
ACI leveraged Voice of America’s existing ColdFusion infrastructure and took advantage of the current Microsoft Word install base by utilizing Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

An integral part of this project was the storing and manipulating of the data with ColdFusion and SQL Server and used an MS Word template that contained blank input fields. The form holds the various fields of a radio script for display to the World Wide Web and archival purposes. The template defaults to Arial Unicode MS font. Unicode is a font set that contains virtually all modern characters including ideographs (e.g. Japanese). The template submits the contents as http post data via VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).

ACI’s roles on the project included obtaining the help of Macromedia to convert the form data to url-encoded UTF-8 format within the VBA code. We then joined the Macromedia beta-testing team to procure an early version of ColdFusion MX 6.1, which was needed to process the data as Unicode. We employed ColdFusion MX 6.1 to insert into and select from a SQL Server backend database. ACI was also produced an XML document containing the radio script and the system sends a notification email to the script editor.

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