Trader Corporation is Ontario's largest publisher of photo-classified advertising. It has over 80 Photo Ad Centres, four Web sites and 55 magazine titles including Auto Trader, Resale Homes, New Homes and Condos. The magazines are distributed provincially at over 9000 outlets. Trader Corporation is a privately held company employing over 600 employees working at five different locations across Ontario.

Ag Buyer’s Guide is a publication for the buying and selling of agricultural products in Ontario, Canada. Buyer’s Guide Ontario was purchased by Trader Corporation…

The Ag Buyer’s Guide publication was receiving more and more pressure to have a web presence, both from one-off sellers/buyers and the equipment dealers that regular listed items in the print publication. At the same time they also recognized the potential for increased ad revenue with on-line only advertising.

The online publication should at least mirror all the items in the print publication while not increasing the work load for producing it.

KMP developed a custom program that would allow the employees of Ag Buyer’s Guide to compile their print publication in a very similar fashion to the process they were used to. This application was hosted on a Citrix Server in the KMP datacenter. By hosting the application, KMP was then able to publish the data on the newly created website.

Ag Buyer’s Guide employees would simply connect remotely to run the custom application, add and remove advertisers, dealers, and equipment sales listings. Once satisfied that the items where correct, they would export the information into a file format that was used by their printers for creating the monthly print publication. This would automatically publish these same changes to the website.

KMP also created a special web section for dealers who were now able to create and delete their own “web only” listings, including descriptions, pictures and pricing information.

Using the dealer interface as a model, the listing of items for sale was also opened up to the general public. For the first time a non-dealer was able to post his equipment for sale on the website, providing of course that the Ag Buyer’s Guide employees approved of the listing.

• Microsoft Terminal Services
• Citrix Thin Client Services
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000
• ASP, & HTML