John Waiveris
john@invisiblegold.com - (860) 285-0172

Portico

Portico was the project after a company merger. I am proud that we accomplished as much as we did. LearnLinc was aquired by Gilat along with Allen Communication. They sent me out to Salt Lake City initially to work with the entire development department, and eventually the manage the Portico team.

I learned a great deal about team dynamics and made more than my share of mistakes along the way. I hired employees, transferred employees from other offices, interviewed my boss, etc. My biggest accomplishment was to develop a team and help build the first product under the new company name.

The majority of our time was spent designing a next generation Learning Management System. Our plan was to use an SQL/Oracle database serving XML data through ASP pages. It would send XML and XSL files to IE5 clients and HTML to older clients. We wanted to achieve complete separation of code, data, layout, and language. Along the way we developed several prototypes to demonstrate each of the concepts.

Rather than jumping right into developing the LMS, we realized that the other products wouldn't be able to support it, so we made a CDROM "developer kit" for the other teams. We distributed it to them so that all of the products could converge within a single development cycle.