Community of Practice Software ported from Linux and PHP to Windows Server 2003 and the .NET Framework for Enterprise Class Customers

Simplify, Tomoye's flagship Community of Practice (CoP) software is built on Linux using PHP, Apache, and MySQL. When some of Tomoye's customers began to outgrow the current offering, Tomoye needed to build an Enterprise scalable CoP platform. The company considered and rejected writing a J2EE application, and instead designed and built a new, highly advanced, highly scalable Web application in C# for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system using the Microsoft .NET Framework and SQL Server 2000. The time to market was a mere 18 months.

Situation

Today's knowledge-intensive organizations operate in a challenging, high-speed, interconnected environment. While organizational structures have been created around business processes, product lines, customers, and teams, experts with similar areas of knowledge are often distributed across the enterprise and disconnected from their peers in other units.

Communities of Practice (CoP) are the antidote to this problem. They are distributed groups of people who share a concern, set of problems, mandate, or sense of purpose.

Tomoye is the Community of Practice Company. Tomoye helps leaders in knowledge-intensive organizations reap the benefit of their collective know-how by building better online CoPs. Tomoye CoP technology and services help foster dynamic, productive Communities of Practice that connect people with people (peers with peers) so that they can accelerate learning, help each other solve critical business problems, and foster innovation.

The Tomoye CoP platform is specifically designed to support the unique requirements of CoPs through a specialized set of models, tools, and processes integrated in a web-based application. The result is a solution that accelerates an organization's time-to-community, time-to-results and time-to-adoption.

Tomoye CoP solutions are powering the people in some of the world's most impressive knowledge-based organizations such as the United Nations, the U.S. Federal Government, the Government of Canada, and Fortune 500 companies.

Solution

The flagship Tomoye CoP platform, Tomoye Simplify, was originally built for Linux using Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP). It was subsequently ported for specific customers to Microsoft Windows NT® using PHP's cross-platform support. Simplify was the first application built specifically for Communities of Practice, and currently supports hundreds of online CoPs that range in size from single communities with hundreds of users to hundreds of nested communities with thousands of users.

After building and deploying Simplify, Tomoye decided that PHP, Apache, and MySQL were not the ideal platform to meet its emerging demand from enterprise class customers. For its enterprise class CoP platform, Tomoye wanted standards-based interoperability, conformance with the platforms and tools used by its enterprise customers, and a rich development toolset.

Tomoye considered and rejected using J2EE. "Java (J2EE) was the strongest alternative to the [Microsoft®] .NET Framework," says Tomoye Director of Product Development Craig Fitzpatrick. "However, Java could only deliver on about 70% of the cross-platform promise. Performance metrics also influenced our decision heavily. Our research showed that using the .NET Framework would accelerate our development time by about 50%, which would allow us to get to market faster, and that the application would be between 10 and 50 times faster at run-time, which would provide definite performance benefits to our customers."

"One of the reasons we chose .NET is because it is a fully commercial framework compared to J2EE," says Tomoye CEO Eric Sauvé. "While our product stands alone as an application, .NET allows us to extend our product with MS add-ons as required by our clients. Each of these pieces are fully integrated, fully supported, and commercially available by one vendor. We are counting on all the pieces to work and fit together!"

"As far as interoperability is concerned, we feel that the interface approach (Web services) is more solid than the portability approach. The reason why we feel the J2EE solution is not completely portable is because your J2EE application doesn't automatically run on every J2EE application server (without designing and verifying accordingly).

"In the end, a commercially supported framework is cheaper. By the time you add the hardware (assuming that it's Sun) and the database (assuming that it's Oracle), the deployment costs even for a free J2EE application server are higher than for the .NET Framework."

Tomoye's decision to choose the C# and the Framework had three major drivers, according to Sauvé: interoperability, enterprise customer requirements, and the richness of the development toolset. The Framework is an integral component of Windows® that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.

Interoperability. "We knew that the only way to go was with standards-based development tools," says Sauvé. "We needed to focus our development resources on developing core functionality that is specific to Communities of Practice, leveraging other tools wherever possible. We also knew that Communities of Practice are becoming a core piece of the architecture organizations are deploying for the business user's needs, and that the most effective deployment of a Community of Practice strategy is one where the application can share information with Information Portals, and Teaming & Collaboration Tools and Productivity Tools. In all of these respects, the [Microsoft] ASP.NET Web services platform was the best-of-breed infrastructure we were looking for - it provided the ability to use other Web services, and to create and share our own Web services, and connect easily with existing enterprise infrastructure.

Enterprise customer requirements. "Our research showed that many of our enterprise customers were standardizing on Microsoft products and had plans to move to .NET Framework-based and .NET-connected applications.

Rich development toolset. "The richness of the product(s) that we could develop with our R&D investment was higher on the .NET Framework than other platforms. The best practices around Web development built into [Microsoft] Visual Studio® .NET were strong influencers."

Tomoye's team of developers, assisted by Microsoft Regional Director Sylvain Duford of Cactus Commerce, spent a year and a half redesigning the application, porting the original functionality, inserting next generation functionality, and making it scale.

Benefits

"Much of the re-write (which happened during the port to ASP.NET) was new infrastructure. We are building an enterprise-scale application. Much of this was done for us, thanks to the .NET Framework. With built-in support for load-balancing, caching, authentication, public assemblies (API's), and Web services, we were able to concentrate on application and Tomoye-specific platform issues. Even though the entire project will be roughly 18 months from start to finish, it could easily have been 3 years without many of the components that the .NET Framework supplied for free."

Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 deserves part of the credit. "IIS 6.0 has been completely re-written and optimized," says Fitzpatrick, "and it comes built into Windows Server 2003. Also, Windows Server 2003 licensing has been split into three tiers: Web, Application, and Server. That is ideal for deploying a Web farm."

The Tomoye development team's observation is that the .NET Framework and tools reduced their total development time in two major ways, according to Craig Fitzpatrick:

1. "Visual Studio .NET is the most productive environment for developing any enterprise application, especially because of the way it makes Web services easier to build.
2. "The components shipped with the .NET Framework very obviously use best-practice-oriented methodologies. Since server-farm Web applications have been hand-crafted over the last 5 to 10 years, it is obvious to us that ASP.NET has bundled all of the learning over that period of time into an off-the-shelf development kit."

For More Information

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For more information about Tomoye products and services, call +1 (819) 246-9007 or visit the Web site at
http://www.tomoye.com/.

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