Firs post (hello world)

This is my first post, so first here's a quick introduction to this blog, what I'll be talking about, and our purpose.

I am the CTO of the Open Compliance and Ethics group, a non-profit organization whose mission is to integrate corporate governance, risk management and culture. In short we deal with business ethics; our goal is to provide a solid, flexible framework that will prevent future Enron-like collapses.

This blog will not be particularly focused on corporate ethics, but rather on our technolgy research, findings, ideas etc...

After looking thoroughly at different CMS packages (and there are are a lot of really good ones out there), we decided a year ago to develop our own knowledge portal. Why? Well, we use a pretty well-defined and complex data schema to create our guidelines and practices, and couldn 't find an easy way to port our existing data and reports to an off-the-shelf product. Also, because our knowledge portal is both a development tool and a way for members to access content, we needed a very robust aand complex permission system.

Our web site URL is http://www.oceg.org. It's still a work in progress, but we've gone a long way over the past few months.

Here's a quick tech overview:

- Database: SQL Server 2005
- Middleware: C#.Net 2.0
- Front-end; ASP.NET 2.0, themes, web parts, AJAX (we're implementing Atlas right now), and the ComponentArt Web.UI suite (http://www.componentart.com)

For unit testing, we're using NUnit and NUnitAsp (slightly modified build to accomodate .Net 2.0 Master Pages).

We're using the Agile development methodolgy; our project management tool is Target Process. We plan 2-week iterations, with a new release every month.

The purpose of this blog is to share our every day findings, tips and tricks, work arounds etc... with the software development community. I hope it'll be useful to some of you.