In 2005 and part of 2006, I was technical officer at Akzo Nobel HQ. I was project leader and lead architect for a project that took the worldwide Internet initiatives of Akzo Nobel to the next level.

The deliverable was to change most of the 200 Akzo Nobel websites into 4th generation websites, steered by heavy use of rich internet applications... but there's a lot more than meets the eye.

Ground-breaking technology

The core of the solution is a service-oriented gateway to corporate information. This Platform can be accessed through a series of web services.

The project was built on Adobe Flash and Flex, the Microsoft .NET platform and Microsoft server products like Biztalk Server 2004, Content Management Server 2002 and SQL 2000.

Read more about the technical details using the following resources:

• An in-depth article (Dutch) on Infoworld.
• The architecture description (Dutch) is publicly available.
• An English summary of the architecture description is also available for download.

In November 2005, the Internet Platform Architecture was competing in the Dutch National ICT Architecture Championships. Unfortunately, we didn't win. However, the jury called the architecture very clear, used the phrase "the Internet Platform is state-of-the-art" and also praised the methodology description. You can read the full jury report if you like.