Razorfish
Company Summary
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 Razorfish 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.
In late ’07 Microsoft bought the company and incorporated us into the APS wing (Advertiser and Publisher Solutions). I am now for the first time in my career in possession of stock options that are actually worth something. Update 12/2009: Microsoft no longer owns us (it’s the French now) and I got “cheated” out of my remaining stock options. Everything’s back to normal year 2000 levels.
Technology Keywords
ATG, eCommerce, Interwoven TeamSite, .NET 2.0-3.5, Oracle, SQL Server, WebSphere, Java/Spring, Microsoft MOSS 2007, Microsoft FAST, Google GSA, PowerPoint, PowerPoint, PowerPoint.
Projects
Dow Jones
Starting in late 2008, I joined the Dow Jones (as a consultant) as eCommerce technology lead for a very large initiative, building a new flexible platform based on ATG commerce and Oracle Billing. Aside the eCommerce pieces, this initiative will also unify the currently separate legacy online and print subscription services into a central user self service portal. The solution greatly extends ATG to handle subscription-based products. Some of the major components include:
- Custom eCommerce Catalog (ATG/BCC) extended to manage subscription-based product scenarios
- Custom shopping experience for web and smartphone devices
- A back-end subscription fulfillment and renewal component based on the jBPM workflow engine
- ATG-based customer service site for managing subscriptions and billing information
- Integration with Oracle/BRM billing and Cognos data warehouse
Unfortunately I didn’t get to really do much coding (aside some queries for the data warehouse), that’s really the pain of having a development team of 25+ people — you get stuck in all meetings all day. cool stuff though! We did get to build some pretty. This solution will be the new platform DJ will use to manage all of their current and future content-based products. Oh, and while it was very painful, it launched on time.
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. Some of the pitches I have worked on include name brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Aetna, Bank of America, and many others.
Media Portal
This was a secret project for one of the large media companies (sorry, can’t tell you which one). Essentially, the idea is to build an online search utility for all kinds of online entertainment. I assessed the technical feasibility, defined the software and hardware architecture required to support the initiative and created a 5 year plan including expenses such as software development, hosting, maintenance. In many ways, this was like doing the ground work for a startup.
PM USA
Back in 2006, I joined one of the larget 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
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