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FIFA Case Study

Benefits

• Streamlines distribution and management of large numbers of assets
• Reduces production and administration costs
• Secures content distribution through digital channels
• Improved tracking, mark usage and approval information

Features

• Intelligent handling of assets including artwork, animations, PDF files etc.
• Secure distribution, tracking and approval of artwork
• Content management with full personalisation and dynamic generation
• Automatic user notification of changes and updates to archive content
• Flexible, fine-grained access control down to the level of individual users and assets
• Powerful hierarchical management of asset, user and content structures
• Scalable architecture capable of multiple storage and server configurations
• Thin client web based administration allows full control of the archive from anywhere
• Easy to use WYSIWYG content authoring and editing tools
• Comprehensive download, usage and approval tracking, monitoring and reporting
• Undo and audit trail functionality allows any administration actions to be reversed or reviewed

Background

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded in 1904 in Paris, with the first official international matches taking place in Europe later that year. Constantly growing, FIFA now has over 200 member associations, making it one of the world's largest sports organisations. The scope of FIFA's roles and duties has greatly extended over the years to include the overall regulation and supervision of the game and organisation of many FIFA events:

• FIFA World Cup™
• FIFA Women's World Cup
• FIFA U-19 Women's World Championship
• FIFA Futsal World Championship
• FIFA Confederations Cup
• FIFA World Youth Championship
• FIFA U-17 World Championship
• Blue Stars/FIFA Youth Cup
• FIFA Club World Championship
• The Men's and Women's Olympic Football Tournaments

The FIFA World Cup™ is the biggest sporting event on earth. Since 1930, every four years (apart from a break during the Second World War), the world holds its breath as teams compete for the FIFA World Cup Trophy. The 2002 FIFA World Cup™ in Korea and Japan, won by Brazil, drew 2.7 million spectators to the 64 matches, and a cumulative audience of 33.4 billion watched the games on TV. The 2006 competition, again involving 32 teams, will be played in Germany.

FIFA Marketing & TV handles the marketing programme for all FIFA events including the FIFA World Cup™. The activities include acquiring and servicing of Official Partners, Official Suppliers and Licensees. In addition, FIFA Marketing & TV is responsible for the creative development and the realisation of integral and innovative sponsoring solutions for its commercial affiliates in order to enable them to efficiently activate their marketing rights. FIFA Marketing & TV is a wholly owned subsidiary and division of FIFA. The world governing football body and its 204 associations exclusively benefit from all revenues generated by FIFA Marketing & TV.

Problem

In the past, FIFA distributed artwork related to its events and activities to commercial affiliates, local organising committees, host cities, broadcast partners, FIFA users and their suppliers , in the form of CDs and binders including the graphic guidelines. This traditional means of distribution had a number of disadvantages including high production costs, lack of version and change control and unauthorised usage, copying and distribution of the material. For the 2002 FIFA World Cup™, FIFA turned to Allsport, a part of Getty Images, and Syrox, a development partner of Allsport, for expertise in the development of an asset management solution to simplify and enhance distribution and control of its Official Marks. In itself this was a complex project involving several thousand users with specific access to content and assets.

With the 2002 FIFA World Cup™ over, FIFA decided to develop an asset management system to encompass all future events up to and including the 2006 FIFA World Cup™. The new system would build on the first digital archive to manage a wide range of FIFA events and activities, and to provide highly customisable content and asset delivery to a large number of users. Primary requirements for the new system were greater control over assets, users and content for non-technical FIFA staff, improved automation and streamlining of workflow, an end-to-end process for the tracking of artwork and the submission of approval requests, the provision for a different but homogenous visual identity for the representation of each event in the archive, plus other refinements such as improved help facilities and better usage reporting.

Key challenges facing Syrox included the development of a fine-grained access control mechanism, which would allow FIFA to specify which users would have access to artwork, content and graphic guidelines, at various levels right down to that of the individual asset and user. In addition, it was important that the system could cope with changes, modifications and redesign of core components in order to meet FIFA's changing requirements.

Solution

The solution employed consists of a completely redesigned data storage archive to cope with the increased volume of assets presented by multiple events. On top of this a browser based user interface and administration thin client were built. The website includes comprehensive security checking which determines the structure of the archive visible as seen by each user. The enhanced search and browsing utilities provide dynamically updated visual previews of assets throughout the archive allowing users to easily navigate to the required artwork, while context sensitive help and Flash help movies assist the user with common or complex tasks. All this is backed up by 24 hour, 365 day a year email and telephone support.

Users are registered by FIFA, and are informed of their assigned user names and passwords by email. When a user logs in to the archive, he or she sees a website where all assets and content are tailored to that user according to the access permissions granted by FIFA. The user first selects the event or activity to display from a list. FIFA controls which events each user or group of users has access to based on the contractual agreements between FIFA and the user's company. Once logged into an event, the website presents an Official Emblem and colour scheme specific to the event which identifies the event while retaining consistency with the rest of the website.

Users are notified of any additions, changes or updates to any of the sections as soon as they log in, so that new or changed assets may be downloaded to replace existing marks. Users are also notified by email when marks are changed, with reference to the specific assets the user has downloaded previously. From the website, users may browse the assets that are available to them according to the access permissions configured for them by FIFA. Users may also search for assets based on keywords, including synonyms in various languages. Users are directed to the relevant graphic and legal guidelines, important documents describing the terms and conditions of proper usage of assets in the archive. Once a user has placed a mark into a proposed piece of artwork, he or she is required to submit a marks approval form, which details the intended usage, along with various other information and a preview file generated from the design containing the artwork. FIFA checks and approves or rejects the application based on the information and informs the user of the result. Additional services available from the website include a map of all the artwork in the event with thumbnails, personal and contact detail management functions, contact forms for getting in touch with the various parties involved in the running of the archive, and comprehensive help pages and animated Flash movies that show how to use the system.

At the heart of the system is the administration interface. Based on thin client interface technology, the administration interface is highly portable and can be used on any computer with a web browser, anywhere in the world. The interface provides full control over all aspects of the archive allowing complete management of user and asset access.

The users, assets and content of the archive are contained in hierarchical structures similar to the files and folders on a hard disk. The administration interface displays these hierarchies as visual trees of items, similar to the way files and folders are displayed in Windows Explorer. The trees can be expanded and contracted at various levels, so that even huge structures can be managed quickly and easily without displaying all items. The trees support full copy and paste functions, and right clicking on tree items presents a 'context menu' that gives quick access to common tasks relating to the item clicked. Items in the tree hierarchies may contain a number of properties that control the appearance, availability and structure of the items. Significantly, these properties may be 'inherited' from items higher up in the hierarchy. This reduces unnecessary duplication of information, and allows for the easy control of the otherwise potentially unmanageable scale of information representing all the items in the archive.

FIFA have specific requirements regarding which assets should be available to particular sets of users. These requirements may be broad ranging, for example, 'all Official Partners are allowed access to the Official Emblem', or may be very specific in terms of users or assets, e.g. 'the user John Smith is denied access to the small version of the portrait emblem'. These requirements reflect the complex regulations that FIFA maintains with respect to the accessibility of assets. Syrox modelled these requirements in two ways: a matrix of permissions controlling access to events, and a flexible rule-based access system for controlling access to assets. The matrix allows for real time updating of event access by means of a grid of ticks and crosses, while the access rules are a set of human-readable instructions relating user groups to asset folders by means of 'allowed' or 'denied' permissions.

The flexibility of the access control mechanism means that the assets and other information available varies dramatically from one user to the next. Consequently, the website presents a highly dynamic view, where all the content presented to a user after logging in is tailored to the user's access permissions and user group. This serves the purpose of controlling access to marks, but also allows FIFA to present particular page content to different users or groups of users, including customising forms for particular companies or supplying translated page text for users from different parts of the world. Again, the hierarchy of content makes handling the many permutations of users and pages manageable without duplication of information.

Content may be easily edited by non technical FIFA staff using WYSIWYG editing functions; tools that look and work like word processing tools, but are embedded into the administration section and useable through standard web browsers. New content, including graphic guidelines in the form of Acrobat PDF files can also be uploaded directly through the administration section. The editorial control is extended further with undo functionality to allow small and large changes to be rolled back, and audit trails which record all changes and modifications to the system.

Assets in the system are mostly in Adobe Illustrator EPS format, as this is the most flexible and commonly accepted format for vector artwork. However, many other formats are handled, including FreeHand files, TIFF and PNG graphic formats, fonts, text and animations. For all formats, the system manages the storage and retrieval of the files and generates a range of thumbnails used to represent the files during browsing and searching operations. The system correctly interprets EPS files with embedded colour profiles and generates appropriate thumbnails and resized images.

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