Hosting: Flexibility is King!

The hosting of an online financial report is a key quality gate for the overall perception of your online reporting. Preconditions for engaging your users with your high end tools and online presentation range from simple high availability through useful analytic/statiscal tools up to complex security issues.

If you specialise in this tiny corner of online financial communication, you have to provide the best possible hosting solution, thats for sure. Your “multi-billion-market-cap-clients” expect best practice being your standard. So we invest a lot (not just timewise) in servers, locations and the like. But that’s the basis, like an entry ticket into our business, nothing I want to write about today.

I would like to highlight our approach of producing static HTML pages to be exported and integrated onto our clients webservers. For various reasons some clients prefer to host the reports. Our goal is to offer all functionalities for these static HTML versions, too. This needs lot of flexibility and high capability to adopt those according to various hosting requirements and different settings regarding PHP JSP or ASP.

For this we extract all web pages from our CMS and save them as HTML files. The duration of this process depends on the amount of web pages. 2000 pages need about 1 hour to be exported. Each page has to be scrutinized and adapted to the different needs of the hosting engine. Afterwards each exported version is carefully checked on our servers by our QC team. Then it is transmitted to the customer.

The ability to include all our interactive tools like Chart Generator, extended search engine, bespoken report function, print/download manager, etc. makes us stand out of the crowd of online financial report producers world wide. I haven’t heard of a competitor so far being capable doing that!

Examples for static reports exported from our CMS and hosted on our clients servers are:

• BASF Annual Report 2008
• Deutsche Bank Annual Report 2008