Progress Case Studies Innovative Publisher Cuts Costs and Improves Time to Market
Edit This Case Study Record
Progress Logo

Innovative Publisher Cuts Costs and Improves Time to Market

Progress
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Education
Product Research & Development
Sales & Marketing
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Search & Rescue
Software Design & Engineering Services
The American Psychological Association (APA) was facing challenges with its existing search engine, Lucene. The search response times were inconsistent, leading to a poor user experience. Moreover, the delivery of content to APA users was slow, taking up to 48 hours to prepare, deliver, and post content on APA websites. This was unacceptable as APA is the authoritative source for this content, and timely online availability is crucial to the authors, readers, and business partners who depend on it.
Read More
The American Psychological Association (APA) is a major academic publisher of journals and books. Founded in 1892, APA's primary objective has been the exchange of scientific information. The APA has 150,000 members and 54 divisions in the subfields of psychology. The Office of Publications and Databases, a major division of the APA, publishes an array of scholarly journals, dozens of books annually, and several academic databases including PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES. The APA's website gets more than one million hits a day, making it the premier provider of information in the discipline of psychology.
Read More
APA replaced Lucene with MarkLogic to speed up content delivery and search results. Early proofs of concept showed MarkLogic would quickly alleviate APA’s pain points. Query speeds consistently hit under one second in testing. Less than 4 months later, APA had completely moved search from Lucene to MarkLogic with no downtime. Customers are already praising the faster response times. Index maintenance is now a small portion of one person’s job which has freed up two developers to focus on new features and performance improvements instead of keeping up a legacy system. That enabled the team to add spell suggest and typeahead features just a few weeks after deploying the search. The APA also was also able to reduce the server count from ten to three.
Read More
Rapid content delivery, subsecond response times, streamlined architecture, and more effective use of resources.
The development team has newfound freedom to build and test new applications and front-end features in as little as a few weeks.
The APA is now focusing on adding semantics services for customers and building new visualization options.
Reduced the server count from ten to three.
Reduced the turnaround time for new content from up to two days to a few minutes.
Cut search response times to less than a second.
Download PDF Version
test test