Sales Partner Media Library for EWE & osnatel

Problem & Context

The sales partners of EWE and osnatel needed centrally managed marketing media with regional control. Campaign films had to be maintained centrally but assigned in a differentiated way: not every location may show every campaign, and what runs at the point of sale depends on region, partner, and approval.

Before the project these processes were scattered and manual — media were distributed as files, responsibilities were unclear, and every new campaign meant hand work in many places. What was needed was an application that brings three things together: a curated media library, a clear permission model, and playback directly inside the sales process.

Architecture Decisions

The result is an enterprise web application with a consistent role model and shop integration. Three decisions shape the implementation.

A consistent role model

The application draws a clear line between administrators, sales partners, and delegates. Administrators maintain the central media inventory and approvals; sales partners see and use only what is approved for them; delegates act on a partner's behalf within their scope. This model runs through the entire application — from viewing to assignment to playback — and is the foundation for the regional control the business asked for.

Template-based content creation

Instead of producing every campaign from scratch, new content is derived from templates. This was the decisive scaling decision: with many partners and regions, manual one-off production would not have been manageable. Templates keep maintenance under control and output consistent with the brand.

Shop integration and point-of-sale playback

The media library does not end in an archive; it plays approved campaign films directly in the shop at the point of sale. Media management and playback therefore live in a single interface rather than in separate systems — a deliberate cut that removes the hand-off between "maintain content" and "show content."

Technically it is a containerized Java/Spring Boot application with a Vaadin frontend and PostgreSQL for storage, delivered through a CI/CD pipeline.

Tradeoffs

As the sole developer and CTO I deliberately optimized the architecture for operational simplicity over maximum feature breadth.

• Vaadin as a server-side UI framework keeps frontend and backend within a single Java stack. For a one-person team that is a big win: no separate frontend ecosystem, no duplicated model maintenance. The price is less freedom for highly custom UI interactions — for a form- and list-driven enterprise application, a good trade.
• A single containerized deployment path instead of a microservice landscape: easier to operate, easier to reason about, easier to maintain by one person. Scaling would be more complex — but that was not the binding requirement for this usage profile.
• Template presets instead of freely designed campaigns: slightly less creative freedom in the individual case, in exchange for a consistent brand and manageable maintenance across many partners.

Result & Status

The platform is in productive use with the sales partners of EWE and osnatel. Campaign films are uploaded centrally, assigned regionally, and played at the point of sale — the loop of maintenance, approval, and playback runs without manual intermediate steps.

As CTO of Vidama GmbH I was the sole developer and owned all custom software development — from planning through implementation to maintenance. The project is representative of the role I worked in at the time: full technical ownership of an enterprise solution, built single-handedly, proven in production.