While Driving Down Costs. Building a More Agile Web Experience

Brought to you by the letter L

The Task: To reinvent Sesame Street online with the same innovative spirit that made the television show so unique by blending educational content in an entertaining way. The web is “a critical distribution mechanism for our content, communications, consumer and partner relationships” as well as “our preferred means of distribution to our consumers and business constituencies going forward”. Initially, the majority of our web content will be repurposed content; however we will move quickly to shift the balance in favor of new content developed under the master content plan described above. “Consumers expect video in the broadband world and it is a powerful way to quickly communicate our global impact”. At launch, the Workshop site will update three times a week, and there will be at least one new or refreshed item of video content with each update. We will differentiate ourselves through our unique tone of voice, our unique perspective on the curricular issues we take on, and a focus on providing answers to the questions parents most often ask us. We will begin to put the centralized model (A) in place at the close of the Web Relaunch Discovery period. We will build skills and train our staff to grow capacity, with the goal of moving to a distributed model (B) approximately one year later. “Ultimately, if you have to go to the ‘Office Of _____” to get something posted on the website, we will fail.”

How Do We Fund This? Advertising Revenue eCommerce Subscription Model COPPA Laws restrict advertising to children under 12. As a non-profit, all eCommerce must be specific to mission (no toys or apparel) The Mission states, “to provide all children regardless of race or socio-economic condition…”

Ok, Really! How Do We Fund This? Sponsorship Limited to adult facing sections ONLY! ePhilanthropy Individual giving will bring in about 5% of production costs for running site.

So…. Cut Costs SLES offers world class support for a hardened, tested, OS Start with standardized hardware and a reliable OS

Benefits of SLES SesameStreet.org quickly grew in its capacity 3 Simultaneous developmental efforts requiring unique environments 2 Testing environments 1 Staging environment 30 servers total required to meet needs Xen Virtualization on top of SLES, runs 30 virtual servers on 6 physical boxes.

Lif era yC 1 Lif era yC 2 Alf res co My SQ L Lif era yC 1 Development Environment

Development Virtualized De v0 1 UA T0 1 De v0 2 UA T0 2 Ga me Te st

What about Application Costs OpenSource became the mantra to provide high quality with low cost Alfresco for the Content Repository and Asset Management System Liferay for the front end Content Management System MySQL for the Database Apache Tomcat as webserver Solr for search Nagios for monitoring

Scalability With 5 digital projects going on at any given time, would the architecture scale? Currently running 50 web properties all built on Linux and OpenSource Used code from SesameStreet.org as the foundation for all other properties Xen virtualized 10 more servers for smaller projects on 2 physical servers Added Red5 OpenSource streaming server for Military project Expanded Alfresco to become a content delivery mechanism

The Real Numbers Came in 2.5 million less than originally budgeted Reduced old server footprint by 80% Increased uptime to 5 9s Phased out external developers saving $200k annually Moved to internal controlled CMS allowing for immediate updates Automated processes saving in both man hours and support costs

Agility Because of the diverse community base of OpenSource, SesameWorkshop has been able to…. Make customizations that become supported integrated components Improve feature sets and enhance them more rapidly at a low cost Do this all without large staff investments

Q&A This slide brought to you by the letters…