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Life@Work :: Avenue A|Razorfish
Company Summary
Avenue A|Razorfish is the largest interactive digital agency out there, providing soup-to-nuts web solutions. I’ve done a lot in the web arena before, but what I thought particularly interesting about AA|RF is that it’s not only a tech company but also a creative agency.
So I threw out the horrible khakis I bought for the NBC job and joined the digital cool as a Sr. Technical Architect.
As of late ‘07, AA|RF is a full subsidiary of Microsoft APS, the application platform services group. I am now for the first time in my career in possession of stock options that are actually worth something.
Technology Keywords
Interwoven TeamSite, .NET 2.0-3.5, Oracle, SQL Server, WebSphere, Java/Spring, Microsoft MOSS 2007, Microsoft FAST, Google GSA, PowerPoint, PowerPoint, PowerPoint.
Projects
After doing a little initial business development work, I joined one of the largest accounts, a big north American tobacco manufacturer (what do you say after having worked at a company for a few weeks and someone asks “Do you have a problem with that?”). It’s actually proven to be quite an interesting client.
Careers Site
My first project was the new development of a careers site for the client, based on WebSphere and Interwoven TeamSite. This was my first introduction to TeamSite, and I spent a lot of time learning the in’s and out’s of the system. My Perl skills were extremely rusty, not having touched Perl since about ‘95. Interwoven is quite a change from a sophisticated repository-driven CMS such as CoreMedia.
I spent quite some time writing a really nice object-oriented rendering framework using the Spring framework, as well as coordinating the technical design and infrastructure setup with the client.
The site launched without a hitch.
Intranet
This project was a little bigger, replacing the entire corporate intranet for the client. I was now in charge of all technical project for this client, and as such started defining the development process, and more importantly, scoping out this project and writing the statements of work.
Due to the nature of the client, we went through a rather detailed technical design and prototyping phase which led to a lot of documentation. Some of the core features were
- Focus on CMS usability — make Interwoven usable by ordinary business users
- Decouple TeamSite and rendering by XML as the exchange format
- Automate a lot of TeamSite tasks (naming/generating of DCRs and XML)
- Preview-Guided editing (also not native to TeamSite)
- A .NET 2.0 based rendering framework
- Custom approval and deployment workflows
- Utilize a Model-Driven-Development approach (MDD) to generate TeamSite DCTs (data capture template) and a .NET content repository layer from a meta content model (yep, it’s fully object-oriented). We’ve done similar things on the T-Online project where we generated wrapper classes from the CMS content model. This approach proved especially valuable with TeamSite, as it reduced the development and maintenance efforts significantly. We didn’t code a single DCT by hand.
- Metadata-driven site permissions
- Oracle database backend
The site launched just fine and the feedback from the business users, content editors, and overall end users was wonderful.
Main Web Site
Building upon the architecture we utilized for the Intranet, comes the next edition: The external facing web site. It uses a lot of the same approaches (and code), but we invented a few new fun things:
- Tracking of page to content items in a separate database (Interwoven really just manages XML files, not relationships. My biggest gripe about this CMS). CoreMedia has this built into the CMS — all internal links are guaranteed to always be consistent
- A better cooler workflow which is heavily e-mail driven and allows business users to approve content without ever logging into TeamSite.
- Fully internationalized web site including translation via the CMS workflow which automatically send the files off to a translation vendor (Fluint/Lionbridge).
- Custom implementation of web site “time travel” — the rendering software can display arbitrary past snapshots of the content in the CMS for legal reasons
- Implementation of W3C Accessibility best-practices
Business Development
Aside the main project work, I’ve been able to do a lot of business development work, partaking in various pitches and answering RFPs, and pitching new potential projects to the client. And that’s what I’ve been spending a lot of time doing at the moment, actually.
Media Portal
I am currently leading the technology side of creating a large video and music portal for one of the big distributors. So I can’t really tell you anything about it yet until it launches :-)
