OpenEdit provides Online Presence for Canada's 2008 Ontario Winter Games

The 2008 Ontario Winter Games connected with over 6000+ visitors a day during this year's competition with real time event updates and thousands of event photos using OpenEdit.

Ian Miller, Vice President of Systems Development here at OpenEdit spent the past 6 months as a volunteer with the 2008 Ontario Winter Games.

What is the Ontario Winter Games? With approximately 3500 participants and over 1000 volunteers, the Ontario Winter Games is the province's largest multi-sport event. It involves 4 days of competition for athletes from 23 winter sports.

As head of Information Technology for the Ontario Winter Games, Ian used OpenEdit to enable many online capabilities, including:

1. Real Time Events Updating - results were published online as soon as they became available throughout the games
2. Online Registration - 4000+ Athletes, volunteers, coaches, and staff including ID Card Generation with photo and unique bar code
3. Image Gallery with eCommerce - 13 photographers were distributed throughout the venues, taking photos everyday of all the sports. At the end of each day the photographers were able to upload their photos into the online gallery for viewing and purchase.

We have been excited to hear how OpenEdit stood up the challenge of this exciting event. Managing thousands of changes to their site over the course of the four day competition was no small challenge. I managed to steal 15 mins with Ian after the games and here is what he had to say.

Joel: Tell me about the image gallery?

Ian: We had 13 photographers covering 23 sports taking thousands of pictures a day.  Once we collected these images from the photographers, we were able import them into the image gallery, apply watermarks and make these images available for sale.  By the end of the games, we had more than 6000 images collected and cataloged by sport and day - a pretty incredible experience for an event of this size.

Joel: You mentioned online registration?

Ian: I used OpenEdit's Media Archive to enable Online Registration. This feature, combined with an integrated PDF capability I managed to get working a few months ago, saved the Ontario Winter Games $18 000.00 in ID card generation alone. It also provided us with the added flexibility of On-Demand ID Card generation for last minute changes in athlete and volunteer information. We were able to create new ID Cards on the fly resulting in better performance for a reduced cost. Not bad really.

Joel: .. and you managed to get real time results online as well?

Ian: Yes. We managed to set real time results publishing from multiple venues and multiple formats. PDF, HTML, word docs, images, faxes - these are few examples of data formats that we managed to publish in real time.

Joel: Overall, how did the site perform?

Ian: As traffic scaled on the site, OpenEdit showed no measurable performance losses, even with over 6500 unique visitors and hundreds of concurrent connections. With over 100 000 page views everyday, I was pleased with the speed and reliability of the site throughout the games.

Everyone here at OpenEdit is very proud to support the 2008 Ontario Winter Games. It was a huge success! Athletes, coaches, staff and volunteers spent months preparing for this event for the benefit of amateur athletes between the ages of 10 & 22 years of age.

For more information about the games, visit www.owg2008.ca