We're nearing the close of a very interesting assignment. We were hired by a large securities broker/dealer to develop a five year digital strategy, vision, roadmap, and tactical plan. It's part of a larger effort to revamp their public web site, recruiting site, advisor extranet, and various web portals. My part of the project was taking part in the tech assessment, where we analyzed their current technical environment to see how it would fit in with the overall strategy.

It was a fascinating project. We started out by gathering some basic information, then flew down for 2.5 days of interviews on site. We got to dig deep on a number of areas, such as their long-term internal initiatives, pain points, advisor experience, and the like. We took those notes back and did some hardcode analysis on them. The end result was a 45-page document that we just presented to the CIO this afternoon. I think he was pleased.

One of the deep dives we did was around content management and Microsoft SharePoint. Our final recommendations were that SharePoint is excellent as an intranet out of the box, but if you want to extend it with custom functionality or look and feel then you're in for some serious pain. Because of that, for their extranet, public site, recruiting sites, and portals, we recommended Ektron.

Other recommendations:

Implement a service-oriented architecture: The client has numerous data feeds to and from customers, partners, and suppliers. The obvious solution is an SOA, and they went into the process expecting that recommendation. I got to do some good research on BizTalk as an ESB, though.

Authorization and Authentication: They're currently using a home-grown forms authentication scheme, with the usernames and passwords stored (unencrypted) in a database table. Not the most secure solution, I'm thinking. We recommended using the asp.net membership with AD, though encrypted database info would also be ok.

Web 2.0/Social Networking: If there's any site that's screaming for some social networking, it's their advisor extranet. They have a big pool of talented financial advisors willing and able to share information, but no way to do so. They also have product managers -- people who run mutual funds, for example -- who would joyfully provide valuable content. Hook the two groups together and I can great synergy. With the new social networking functionality of Ektron, it'd be really easy to integrate.

Mobile is another no-brainer. Advisors don't want to sit there at their desks emailing powerpoints to their clients. They want to be able to get their information at any time, from anywhere. Add some mobile functionality to the site and an advisor can get a portfolio summary for his client from his cell phone, as they're playing a round of golf.

Development Methodologies: they have a really good dev team, with years of industry experience and deep product knowlege. Better still, their code toads get to actually code, instead of spending most of their time in meetings. However, they have no formal development methodologies -- a client requests something, it gets assigned to a developer or two, and they just crank it out. Cowboy coding at it's best, right? We recommended Agile development, and I think it'd work well for them.

Other recommendations were pretty basic: host your sites externally for DR purposes, use a solid SSO package, etc. -- nothing exciting, but valuable nonetheless.

All in all it was an interesting experience. I got to do some deep research on technologies that interested me, and provided what I think was useful information to the client. I hope to get more of such assignments in the future.