CASE STUDY: LL Bean Park Searchsm
part II

When we're ready to send out the annual mailing, we can first preview the pages. The print house, using this menu, can select which portions to print at a given time, and can see a count of how many properties are in each group, to have the right type and amount of paper ready in their high-speed printers.

The mailing comes from a two page Access report. The first page is a letter to the person in charge of the property, requesting their help for the annual update. A more integrated mail merge could be accomplished using MS Word, and EON Webware can help clients with such projects, but it was not necessary for the Parks letter. The address is all that changes from park to park.

The second page shows what current information we are running about the park. Sub-reports bring in the images from the hard drive and even format the Activities Checklist to appear very similar to what shows on the Web page.

After the responses come back and all the changes are completed for the year, we run this little Visual Basic program, written by a predecessor on the project. Originally, every page used multiple sub-queries to gather all the information needed. This made the program run take up to 4 hours. EON Webware did some SQL clean-up and brought that down to under 10 minutes. We also enabled the pages to be created in Preview mode for the editor to check the work before the final CD is burned and delivered to LL Bean. When any final changes are complete, the actual, live pages are written using the same program, now with special coding in place for LL Bean to insert their own navigation elements, which change from year to year. We provide the meal, they put it on the plate, so to speak.