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.

Macromedia Site of the Day

The first website, www.akzonobel.com, went live in August 2005. It hit the top of the charts on Macromedia.com in October.


More resources:

• Akzonobel.com, first product of the Platform;
• the offical press release;
• Site of the Day on Macromedia.com.

Spreading The Word

The 24th of January, I presented the Internet Platform project at an international senior-executive summit at the Grand Hotel Amsterdam. The event (which went by the name "Maximising Website And Online Communications") attracted a crowd of international experts and business stakeholders. Read more on this topic on the website of the European Networking Group.