Elsevier España

Elsevier.es is a very famous and large online store for books and magazines in the field of medicine and health sciences. It is known among health researchers, university students of medices sciences, and others in the field, for its large offer of publicly available scientific articles.

A dedicated MySql server, 4 duplicated Apache servers and a dedicated Apache Solr server powers the website delivering access to more than 45.000 unique visitors a day.

The technical challenges of this project were numerous and big. The client provided us with a large list of very specific requirements that should all be integrated in a fully working, high performant, stable and secure e-commerce site.

One of the major particularities was that the data would not be entered manually, but by a daily migration from an existing Oracle database. This migration had to take care of automatically updating existing nodes, removing old nodes, creating taxonomies on-the-fly, relating content -hierarchical structure of magazines, subscriptions, summaries and articles-, etc. 

Many were the difficulties the team was faced with during the development phase, but we managed to solve them all, and the result now is a stable e-commerce site that is world widely visited and is even inspiring Elsevier departments of other countries to copy the same model !