The Apollo Portal project is the successor to an earlier site that I wrote for the company. The previous site was an ASP.NET driven intranet that allowed employees to view a lot of information, but did not offer a two-way communication medium. Staff could read information, but could not not present any new information to the intranet. This scenario was ideal for the use of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. The portal allows employees access to critical company information as well as offering employees the opportunity to collaborate in a number of ways both internally and externally.

My role in this project was to serve as the lead programmer in porting existing intranet applications to SharePoint Web Parts and Web Forms that "hang on the edge" of the portal. The company was looking for a way to integrate several systems into a single interface, which the portal allowed us to accomplish. The Web Part library that was developed for the portal accesses several sources of data ranging from engineering data to accounting and shipping data. The Web Part library paired with the SPS interface gives the company a single common interface for accessing multiple sources of data. The products that Apollo manufactures are primarily custom and it is critical that the information used to manufacture these custom products is as accurate as possible. As a result, a common interface to view this data by sales staff was constructed by accessing a custom database maintained by engineering and displaying that information in real-time to sales staff by using an SPS Web Part. Similar functions were performed to provide customers with sales order information and tracking of packages by accessing data from the company's accounting system.

The project consists of 5 VS.NET 2003 projects. The base libraries are used to wrap logic from the SharePoint APIs into meaningful business objects that are consumed by Web Parts used by the company. The Web Part library is built upon the functionality of the base libraries and also from a custom Web Control library. The Web Control library was developed to render controls inside of a SPS Web Part or on a Web Form. This was important to provide certain Web Controls to be accessed from Windows Mobile devices. As a result, engineering data and package tracking information can be accessed from SmartPhones running Windows Mobile 5 from the same codebase that powers some of the SPS Web Parts.

The project is ongoing since the staff is always requiring new tools in order to do their job more efficiently.