For National Semiconductor Corp., Lotus Development Corp.'s Domino and PointCast, Inc.'s I-Server were obvious choices for building a new, mission-critical marketing information system called National Advisor.

For one thing, the chipmaker was already a Lotus Notes shop. And a lot of users already had PointCast's client for accessing Web-based news channels. These made software implementation and training costs negligible. "You basically just bolt one more channel" onto the PointCast server, says Phil Gibson, director of interactive marketing at National Semiconductor, in Santa Clara, Calif.

At least as importantly, Gibson says, is that Lotus and PointCast jointly created the Domino.Broadcast application, so their products are compatible. This meant Gibson's team had to do a lot less grunt work to to integrate the two sides of the system.

Nevertheless, design and implementation was a two-person, six month job. What follows is a brief description of that process:

The development team used Percussion Software's Notrix to write the data pump that got data from various sources, then summarized the data and stuffed it into a central Lotus Notes-based data warehouse, Gibson says. Information sources include the Notes-based sales force automation system, a Sybase Corp. corporate data warehouse for revenue information and a system that used Microsoft Corp.'s Analyst and Accrue Software, Inc.'s Insight to monitor and gather key information about customer activity on National Semiconductor's Web site.

It took about a month to write all the agents the team needed for assembling the data it wanted. "We're very fluent in Notes, and pulling views in Notes is a straightforward process,'' Gibsons says.

National Semiconductor is in the process of switching to Lotus' Notespump, which was more expensive and less feature-rich than Notrix at the time of the implementation. Notespump "has a stronger roadmap [than Notrix] for integration with legacy IBM databases," Gibson says.

And unlike Notrix, Notespump supports live connections to the original data resources so that users, or the push system, can extract records or bytes on an as-needed basis, Gibson says. This would greatly reduce the total transactional load, since "users only need maybe 5% of the total data," he adds.

In contrast, the present Notrix system involves "importing large quantities of data from various databases to a data warehouse," Gibson says.

National Semiconductor uses Domino.Broadcast, Lotus' channel creation tool, to determine which files and records, from which data sources, are delivered to which subscriber groups. "Domino.broadcast is a push-button tool: You install, it works," Gibson says.

Setting up the PointCast channels that receive the Domino.Broadcast channel data and actually pushes the data out to users' desktops was the most complicated task because the team wasn't familiar with the product, Gibson adds.

This portion of the project took two to three months.

It took about a day to create views into that data, optimized for different audiences such as operations, marketing and sales; and sliced by attributes such as type of device sold or type of customer. "I started out [working for National Semiconductor] in account management/sales, then running a product line, so I basically took my best shot [at the views] and then spent a lot of time getting feedback from actual users," Gibson says.

"It's hard to get people to visualize what they want before they've actually used the tool," Gibson says. "It's best to do a straw dog, let them try, and then listen to their comments."

- Elisabeth Horwitt