In an age of social, technological and industrial change, the earliest metal known to humanity, copper, continues to play a vital role in a multiplicity of functions around us. In addition, it is increasingly used in high technology applications, in the fields of communications, transport, renewable energy and applied superconductivity.

Business Case

The European Copper Institute (ECI) and its members are committed to strengthening and expanding copper usage in Europe. On behalf of its members, ECI aims to strengthen public awareness of copper's value to society and its role in the environment, based on scientific research.

ECI teamed with PeopleWare to develop a solution that allowed its members to receive up-to-date information via a push channel. Hence, member organizations -including major European companies- would no longer need to go and seek information on websites, extranets, etc...

With the new solution in place, new and updated information was automatically distributed. This meant less administrative overhead for ECI, but overall it was incredible time-saving as well.

Implementation

The project runs on a mixture of technologies, including Microsoft .NET , the open source version control system SVN (subversion) and the Apache web server. SVN and Apache were used for storing different versions of the information that had to be dispatch. Since SVN already had all the necessary versioning features that were required by the business, it was obvious for PeopleWare to seamlessly integrate this open source project within the solution. The .NET framework on the other hand was chosen for the development of the client software and for gluing everything together.