Project Phoenix officially kicks off

The Quickflix office is alive with activity. Project Phoenix is now full steam ahead after a brief prep talk meeting this morning over coffee and muffins. While my portion of work has a name, we've still yet to come up with some decent project names for the other units. The remaining large portions of work to be named are the CRM implementation, the Allocation re-write, redevelopment of the financial systems, and redevelopment of our backoffice inventory tools (which we call "Director").

A little on Project Phoenix: At this point in time we've decided to use a third-party CMS application called SiteCore. We have quite a bit of experience with this CMS in house, however we've never done anything quite as big as Quickflix in it. We will be customising the actual CMS quite a bit to make it suit our needs, however it does save us writing alot of functions we would rather not have to deal with by providing them right out of the box (workflow, editors, pre-built tools, security etc). Right now I am in the process of setting up a virtual machine to use for development and training and it is a good learning exercise in setting up a SiteCore environment. The virtual machine will have Visual Studio 2005, SQL 2005, SiteCore 5.3 and the .net 2.0 framework all running on the Windows Server 2003 OS.

My goal by the end of this week is to be familiar with SiteCore enough to produce a prototype of the next Quickflix. Stay tuned for info if I can achieve this and any hurdles I come across.