Company Profile

cars.com is operated by Classified Ventures L.L.C. with content provided by Classified Ventures, Central Newspapers Inc., Gannett Co. Inc., Knight-Ridder Inc., The McClatchy Co., The New York Times Co., Tribune Co., The Washington Post, and over 130 of their affiliate information providers. cars.com is an interactive information service with national exposure to new and used car inventories.

The Challenge

cars.com wanted a dynamic data retrieval and receiving system able to interpret up to eight different types of proprietary database file formats. The Content Management System provided the administration process such as editing, error checking and reordering process into a standard text format for use in the cars.com web site.

Outlook's Solution

Outlook Technologies delivered a fully automated system for cars.com. Outlook’s development team first analyzed the format of the eight different incoming database text files and then designed a custom scripts that would parse the files based on embedded tags characteristic of each format. The custom script would then reorder the text, matching cars.com data model, and upload the new format to cars.com's database for integrated use in their web site.