When NetReach, Inc. begins a project with a customer, the business goals of the customer are carefully examined to ensure that the resulting e-commerce solution will meet their needs and operate properly. "Planning and tying together all the pieces is an enormous challenge," notes Michael W. Cullina, executive vice president of Custom Solutions for NetReach, Inc. "We rely on Microsoft® Windows® 2000 products as the best tools to make the development process go smoothly, economically and with maximum efficiency."
Customer Profile
Founded in 1995, NetReach, Inc. is a provider of connectivity, hosting, and development solutions for businesses. NetReach possesses the strategic and technical resources necessary to plan, deliver, and manage complex e-commerce Web sites. Headquartered in Ambler, Pennsylvania, NetReach is a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider and a Registered Web Presence Provider for Microsoft FrontPage® 2000 and Microsoft Project 98.
Using Windows 2000 at the Cornerstone ...
In the fall of 1999, EarthMed.com came to NetReach to completely revamp their existing Web site. To capitalize on market opportunity, EarthMed.com was committed to relaunching as a major portal site in record time. The legacy site was highly complex, consisting of many thousands of pages of content and "member" Web site content. The site was extremely difficult to maintain and couldn’t be scaled further.
... For Efficient E-commerce Development
In order to meet requirements defined by its financial backers and, more importantly, to capture the "first mover" advantage in the alternative health care portal space, EarthMed (as the new site was to be named) had to move as rapidly as possible to completely rebuild their site, in order to make it modular, maintainable, and much more scalable. The entire site was to be database-driven in order to incorporate advanced personalization techniques, new features and functions, and to build the data repositories that are core assets of a portal site.
The site developed by NetReach is EarthMed.com, one of the world’s largest online holistic health communities. Customers can now take advantage of online shopping for health and wellness products, locate holistic health practitioners and services nationwide, participate in auctions, visit the career center, use online appointment scheduling, check the daily calendar of holistic health events, read articles from leaders in the health and mind-body field, and much more. Practitioners now have access to a wide range of services to build their practices, to get Web sites, and to network with other professions.
The normal time frame for the development of such a sophisticated portal might be six months with 20 developers working full time on the project. By using Microsoft Windows Distributed interNet Applications Architecture (Windows DNA) as the application development model for the Windows platform, together with NetReach's finely honed RAD (Rapid Application Development) methodology, the NetReach/Earthmed.com team was able to deliver a high-quality, tightly integrated product with a 15-person team in only six weeks.
"It was amazing seeing the development process," says Jason Cohen, president of EarthMed.com. "NetReach had a great team working at warp speed, so coordination was paramount. I now understand more than ever the importance of the technology of Windows 2000 products specifically designed to tie everything together."
Software and Services
Microsoft Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition
Microsoft SQL ServerTM 7.0
Microsoft Visual Basic® 6.0
Microsoft Visual InterDev® 6.0
Microsoft Visual Modeler
Microsoft Visual SourceSafeTM
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server with Microsoft Internet
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000
http://www.netreach.net
