The "IT doesn't matter" theory
Client empowerment
Our central belief is that any web-based application or web site must be managed directly and independently by the Client. As the old saying goes: You can control your web site or control your budget, not both.
Therefore, a large part of our effort with our Clients consists in assisting them to internalize as much as possible (and as required) of the application management operations. We will achieve this notably:
- By providing operation staff with web-based administration utilities,
- By training and documenting extensively,
- By using the simplest technologies and architecture possible compatible with the requirements (notably security requirements).
This approach appeals especially to SMEs with limited IT resources, typically managing a corporate network. Of course we also cater to companies with no IT resources at all - in which case we perform a larger parts of operations on their behalf.
So our keywords are:
- Simplicity,
- Transparency,
- Openness.
To give a few examples:
- Some of our customers manage themselves their own static web sites (co-located, multilingual, about 200 pages), by directly updating XML content files. This is extremely cost-effective for them.
- One customer manages its own web content extraction infrastructure in an in-house machine.
- We have deployed a music e-commerce site with a PHP/ MySQL shopping cart. Our customer's team fully operates it; their IT skills are those of average Excel and Access users.
We are working hard at popularizing the idea that managing oneself an Apache/ PHP/ MySQL environment, either in-house under Windows 2000 or in a co-located environment, is fairly easy, even to non-specialists.
Some of it can even be great fun: we were amazed to see how non-specialists were having fun at learning to use an XML editor.
