Back in August of 2010, I was hired by HDI to create an online professional community for their members and non-members. The site lives at http://www.hdiconnect.com and went live in November 2010. Since then, we've issued a couple of updates. Goals for the site included building a community where people in the helpdesk niche could interact around such subjects as Support Operations, Service Management, and Desktop Support, where non-members could learn about the benefits of becoming an HDI-certified professional, and where the HDI marketing and content teams could add and modify the website content without being bottlenecked by the business solutions team.

From an implementation perspective, this was a challenging project because I needed to integrate 3 software products with which I had no familiarity. I love challenges!

The core of the solution is Sitecore CMS. It's a content management platform whose flexibility and richness has grown on me over the past several months.  HDI's contact and membership data is stored in Microsoft CRM, so I wrote custom ASP.NET membership and profile providers that allow Sitecore to authenticate against CRM and read/edit relevant profile information.

While Sitecore is used to manage the general content, the blog posts and discussion forum content is stored in Jive. From a UI perspective, the Jive content fits seamlessly into the site. Under the covers, we're managing the blog and forum data using Jive's REST API.

Because HDI will implement additonal websites in Sitecore, I made the decision to put together a control-based framework. There's no code behind on the ASPX pages and ASCX user controls. Instead, the logic is built into controls that know their current context. Everything built for HDIConnect is being leveraged and re-used for the next set of websites. As our team has worked on the next set of websites, we've shown that strategy to be effective by delivering at a faster rate.

Speaking of the team, that's one of the best aspects of HDI. The other members of the business solutions team provided a great deal of support and assistance during the project. The marketing team and business solutions team work well together. Problems are solved with the attitude of working together for the benefit of the company. It's quite an enjoyable place to work.