Internet Direct - Driving Auto Dealers on the Web

Auto Inventory and Data Management on the Internet

Providing people with Internet access composes a significant portion of business for Internet Service Providers. However, having the resources to actually equip businesses with a powerful presence on the Web entails much more. For Chris Bader, President of Internet Direct, Inc., supplying Internet access and services is only part of the technical solution that Internet Direct offers its customers. "In addition to providing Internet access and basic Internet services, Internet Direct targets specific markets for developing solutions that allow businesses to integrate their business models with the Internet," notes Bader.

When Bader saw the opportunity to create a data management solution on the Web for a group of auto dealers, he knew that he needed a robust solution that could manage not only the large inventory involved in selling automobiles from various dealers, but one that could also handle customer contacts and sales tracking. This first opportunity resulted in the development of the North Dakota Motormall, a collaboration of various auto dealers. The inventories of all the dealers are available on the ND Motormall site as well as the individual dealer Web sites: Minot Chrysler, Ressler Chevrolet, and Cedric Theel, Inc.

Driving Sites, Searches, and Solutions with 4D RDBMS and 4D WebSTAR

In order to accomplish the task, Internet Direct relied on the powerful combination of the 4D development environment with the 4D WebSTAR Server Suite. "We selected 4D not only because of our past successes with it, but also because it provided a robust, rich, user-friendly environment that was cross-platform," notes Bader. The basic infrastructure was originally developed around the Macintosh platform, but with 4D’s cross-platform capabilities, had the added benefit being seamlessly transported to Windows without the need for recoding or restructuring.

After initially beginning with 4D Server v6, Internet Direct recognized that at the time, most of the auto dealers involved only had 28.8 kbps dial-up access. As with most client/server technologies, and when considering the amount of inventory data that needed to be managed from a remote database including images, Internet Direct sought a different, more distributed approach. The current implementation that now uses 4D v6.7 has the auto dealers using remote databases, and from these remote databases, the dealers synchronize inventories through a central 4D Server, which provides a single data collection point and allows Web connectivity to this data. "The remote databases provide each dealer with a robust database solution, either as a single workstation or multi-user solution, which handles inventory management, sales, and customer data," said Bader. The single 4D Server, which provides Web-based access allows the inventory of each dealer to be presented as a dealer’s Web sites as well as a collective Web site of all dealers.

Another aggressive feature of Internet Direct’s solution involves promoting dealers by giving newspapers access to parts of the inventory that have been chosen for print advertising. "We have written tools that allow the local newspapers access to the inventory that the dealers mark for print advertising," explains Bader. "Essentially, the people from the newspapers simply point and click, and they get all of the ad copy and photos for a dealer. In addition, this can be updated as often as the dealers want."

4D and 4D WebSTAR Connectivity

Internet Direct’s current infrastructure includes a central 4D Server v6.7 integrated with 4D WebSTAR via 4D Link, a WebSTAR plug-in that serves complete HTML pages, and allows 4D WebSTAR to redirect requests to 4th Dimension’s built-in Web server. When a Web browser selects a URL that contains a reference to 4D Link, 4D WebSTAR passes that request through to 4D, which then executes the method and returns the results to 4D WebSTAR for serving to the browser. According to Bader, "Each of the dealers has the option of using a single-user workstation version for inventory management, which in addition to other 4D technologies, also uses 4D Write. Or they have the option to use a more advanced multi-user version which includes customer contact, sales tracking, etc., and in addition to other 4D technologies uses 4D Server v6.7 and 4D Write.

Implementing a Winning Web-Serving Solution with 4D WebSTAR

Internet Direct chose to implement 4D WebSTAR as ND Motormall’s Web server for a variety of reasons. After starting out with IIS on Windows NT 4.0, they realized that their Web-serving needs weren’t being met as well as they could have been with 4D WebSTAR. "4D WebSTAR was clearly the most obvious choice," notes Bader. "It is far easier to administer, far more secure, and much easier to evolve and maintain. It also provided better integration with 4th Dimension, upon which we rely heavily." Internet Direct makes extensive use of WebSTAR’s FlexMail plug-in, a form-processing utility where administrators can generate multiple customized e-mail messages from form data, save form data to disk, and write new HTML files to disk based on the form input.

The current 4D WebSTAR server for ND Motormall runs on an iMac of 400 MHz with 256 MB RAM, handling approximately 500,000 hits a day, and 4D Server runs on a separate iMac with the same basic configuration. The 4D WebSTAR server also provides e-mail services for approximately 200 accounts. In addition, the auto sites are serving between 12,000 and 18,000 vehicle requests a day. For Bader, one of 4D WebSTAR’s most appealing features is the scalability that it offers. "4D WebSTAR allows us to take advantage of the FlexMail form processing, and is also attractive because we can readily expand with many additional features," said Bader.

For the Internet Direct team and the dynamic Web solutions that they have implemented, the future looks bright as they look forward to creating even more solutions with the powerful team of 4D and 4D WebSTAR. According to Bader, "One of the more significant technical features that we hope to exploit further is the integration with 4D. Furthermore, we plan to move all of these servers to OS X, and from what I have seen so far with 4D WebSTAR, the integration between these two platforms will evolve in a direction that will benefit us."

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