It was time to refactor this website, offer new services, organize content, and hone our client focus. I will recount the process here, partly for historical reasons and as documentation for later, but also just because the whole process was so cool. First, the technology used was, as always, 100% GPL'ed or BSD licensed software, from the content management system, to the flash animations, to the images, 3-d modelling, PDF generation, authoring, hosting, and database. If I think of anything else, I'll throw it in the soup. Everything from start to finish was done with 100% software libre.

That's a good feeling to me. I like having my data, my work, creative and technical in a format that is future-proof. It's one of the benefits that our clients have as they move forward. You, our client, have the benefit of being able to move forward without worrying about how you will haul all your intellectual property and stuff it into its new home.  The bigger you are and longer you have been around, the more the word "legacy" exacts its demans upon you and your budget.

With Altamente, you do not have to scrap your legacy just to get a new feature. All the software that Altamente uses and owns, you own too. That's right, you own the software that this portal runs. You own the 3-d animator. You own the flash generation tool. You own the 64 bit powerful transaction database server. You own the webserver. You own the graphic image manipulator program. You own the vector drawing tool. Every bit of the stack is owned by you the client. Owning the code that lies beneath my business is a great feeling to me, and I imagine it is also a comfort to you.

So, why did we need to refactor?  Altamente is growing.  We now have more associates generating content, and filtering all of the articles through a single admin account just wasn't going to cut it.  We need to have a separation of duties, user accounts with access controls, a moderation system, forums, etc.  We built all of these things into our clients' websites, we thought it was about time we did the same for ourselves.