File > New > Intranet

This is the first step of this journey, we want to tell you what we have built so far.

One year ago we started an “Intranet 2.0” project for a small bank.

The project main goal was to improve the ease of access to key informations, avoid personal (and sometimes out of sync) document folders, on user’s desktop.

We found a “Yahoo Directory” of about 4.000+ relevant documents (250.000+ pages).

To simplify document retrieval, every office developed a custom taxonomy to catalog corporate documents.

In the beginning there was Chaos,
And within this Chaos was Power,
Great Power without Form

Forget Google and try to search the internet browsing the “Yahoo Directory”.. you got it!

Our first goal was: no more phone calls to “knowledge owners” to find “that document” or endless filesystem style browsing in search of relevant informations.

So our first domain was a DMS.

library
library by kiarras, on Flickr.

Then we moved on:

  • Support Ticketing with Knowledge Base,
  • Corporate address book,
  • Home Banking workflow,
  • Point Of Sale workflow,
  • Resource scheduling system,
  • Corporate bookmarks,
  • Corporate chat & file exchange,
  • Active Directory sync,
  • Personal & team calendars,
  • Organisation chart,
  • IT asset inventory,
  • Analytics.

Some domains have been implemented with CQRS+ES, others with CRUD.

Next post I’ll cover the current architecture and our dev stack.

Stay tuned!

Intro

This blog is about a journey we want to share: we are building a new software product, learning day by day something new from our users, from our mistakes, from our friends.

Why we are doing this? (Quid pro quo)

No this blog is not a marketing effort, it’s a giveback to the dev community; a giveback we hope can improve our learning journey through your feedback and maybe avoid you a headache for the same mistakes we made.

ok.. show me the code.

What you will find on this blog?

We plan to publish all the code with you (yes, the whole product.. not just code snippets) in 6-9 months when we hope to reach a full featured 1.0 release and have 500+ active paying users.

We’ll share more about the product (domain insights), tradeoffs and our current dev stack (AngularJS, .Net, NEventstore, CQRS / ES / DDD, MongoDB, Elasticsearch) in the next weeks.

So.. No code? No party! Hold on… software development is a learning process, working code is a side effetc

That’s the point, we started this journey one year ago and we are pretty happy with this way of thinking / doing things.

We want to share what we have learned so far and what we’ll learning in the next months (and yes.. some code too).

Who we are

My name is Andrea, I run a small (4 devs) software house in Italy and I’m very active in the local dev communities.

I failed twice at blogging, this is my 3rd try and the first one in English (well beyond my comfort zone).

I asked a close friend in the dev community to join us for the next months, we have a new customer and we need to scale up to 100x in terms of data, 4x in terms of active users and a backlog with a lot of new interesting stuff.

Let me welcome on board Gian Maria.

My Name is Gian Maria, I’m an independent consultant on .NET technologies, ALM and Microsoft Team Foundation Server and I’m passionate about everything about developing.

I have a huge interest about DDD and modern software architectures and I was really amazed about the product Andrea built in really short time with its company, so when he start needing help I was really excited to jump in it. The best part of starting collaborating in this project is probably the idea of publish everything online to share [ code | opinions | comments | everything ] with DDD community.

In the end…. I’m really exited and I hope this will reflects in my blog posts, stay tuned.

Wrap-up

Me and Gian Maria we’ll keep this blog up to date with our journey, and we hope to have guest posts from our friends sharing a similar path (and some code) on other projects. Yes, we are looking at you Stefano and Alessandro.

Thank you guys

This journey wouldn’t be possible without:

Our chats about aggregates, process managers, ubiquitous language, eventstorming, CQRS and Domain Driven Design are the building blocks of this journey.

A special mention goes to Rinat Abdullin for inspiring this blog with his HappyPancake post.

Curious? Suggestions? we are waiting your feedback and we have room in our blog backlog.

09.09.2014

coming soon…

hits in meta, if you don’t have already inspected page source :P