The system receives competition information from the Venue Results applications and distributes it to 15,000 media through more than 700 Fuji Xerox printers. At the competition venues, printed results
The system receives competition information from the Venue Results applications and distributes it to 15,000 media through more than 700 Fuji Xerox printers. At the competition venues, printed results are also distributed to international sport federation officials, athletes, coaches
and media.
More than 35 million pages of results will be printed on demand. Each of the 39 competition venues will house its own client/server scenario, with Xerox multi-function printers connected. Its a major departure from the Atlanta Olympic Games where all results filed were stored on a central mainframe across all the venues, which left every competition venue at risk if the mainframe went down. In Sydney, each competition venue is self-contained, with its own network
and print devices.
Tony Goodman, Fuji Xerox Technology Project Manager for the Games said that for the first time, the volume of print produced was being driven by the attendance at the venue. The press, broadcasters and sport and competition management at each venue receive only the reports they require.
So, for example, if only 20 press and broadcasters are scheduled to cover the swimming, then only 20 start lists will be produced for them. It is part of the Green Games initiative. To eliminate wastage, we will only print what is required, and anything we do print is printed on recycled paper, says Goodman.
The print software developed specifically for the job falls into two halves. The input component, developed by IBM, receives the print files from the results system, both local and remote, then spools and locally stores the file. It then consults a table, which holds the numbers of press, broadcasters and others present at the venue and generates sufficient print jobs to satisfy the requirements.
Each job contains a cover sheet, the print file and appropriate commands to print the required quantity and provide any finishing, such as stapling, if required. The jobs are then forwarded to the output component for printing, which is the Xerox PrintXchange software, responsible for accepting the jobs and dynamically routing them to the printers.
Depending on requirements, the venues contain from two to 28 printers.The company has provided 200 results printers, 800 digital copiers, more then 800 fax machines, 200 desktop printers and up to eight Electronic Publishing System printers. Under the Games green policy as much as possible of the equipment must be recyclable and that includes the toner cartridges, which will be removed from the games venues by the company and taken to its local factory for recycling after the Games.
While Fuji Xerox will be responsible for printing results at the time and the results books at the end of the Games it also will be putting them onto CD. The company has developed new software that allows staff working at the main print centre to take all the results files, convert them to PDFs and automatically assemble them into complete electronic books, which are then transferred to the CDs.
Olympic result books are produced for each sport at the end of competition and are a compilation of all the information pertaining to the final results. From 28 Olympic sports, there will be 37 different titles, covering all disciplines. The usual procedure is to print hard copy results books, however, there will now be a choice of hardcopy or CD.
While developing the technology was straightforward, Fuji Xerox had to ensure strict International Olympic Committee criteria were met before they were able to proceed with the project. Every Result Book CD is encrypted with a digital signature, outlawing duplication.
In addition to producing 1,000 CDs, Fuji Xerox will print, collate and bind more that 50,000 hard copy results books totalling more than 8 million pages, with each book printed in a maximum turnaround window of 72 hours during the two-week event.
However, to get those results in the first place several applications had to be developed to collect, co-ordinate and collate the data. The Venue Results applications collect competition data including timing, scoring and statistical information from each event and process the results based on international sporting federation rules. They have three major functions that are customised for each of the 28 Olympic sports.
The event management tool is used before competition to manage certain aspects of the competition, such as selecting judges and determining athlete line-ups. During the competition an event control tool captures statistical information and event data at the venue; computes the times, scores, etc., then transmits this data to a variety of integrated information systems.
Results and competition progress are sent to different output devices such as venue scoreboards, the Commentator Information System (CIS) used by more than 1,000 broadcasters at the Games, the TV graphics to be displayed on TV screens around the world and printers throughout the Olympic Games locations.