After an arduous amount of time spent brainstorming, strategizing, (drinking), and doodling with our friends at Abovo Marketing Group, we have finally re-branded our baby. The open source version of our rockin’ site management system, i3SiteTools is…

Why do you use ColdFusion? This is a question Digital Positions gets every once in a while from prospective clients and even the occasional current client. Typically it’s brought about because they heard about some other language (PHP, ASP, .NET), or they’ve spoken to a “one-system” shop (“We only use Microsoft!” or “Give me Sun or give me death!”) who had less-than-positive things to say about ColdFusion. Digital Positions loves it when this happens because it gives us a chance to have the real conversation ... It’s not about the code, it’s about the application!

Yes, as a company Digital Positions made a strategic decision to use ColdFusion as our primary development environment. We chose ColdFusion over the many other options out there, because it allows our team to quickly and efficiently develop complex solutions .... Our applications are faster, more stable and out of production more rapidly than with other languages or environments.

So, solutions that are stable, robust and faster to market ... Now do you understand why we have chosen ColdFusion?

However, as a matter of course, we do not limit ourselves. In the real world, expertise in other languages and environments is required  We have the ability to develop in PHP, ASP, .NET and Java when client projects demand.

In the end the language used to develop your site should not be the deciding factor. Your users typically don’t care what it’s coded in, they just want to get the information they need or to purchase the product they want quickly and easily. So leave the architecture to the web developers and concentrate on satisfying your users, hitting your revenue goals and getting that next promotion.

Operation RIA

i3SiteTools Beautification & Documentation

We are hard at work giving some overdue love and attention to our very own CMS, fixing little bugs and rethinking the flow of some of the tools. i3SiteTools is the engine that has driven the Content Management side of our business and we are excited about taking it to the next level in 2006! We are planning a new RIA dashboard that will give our users even easier access to the content on their site and puts all of the information they need at their fingertips including some traffic stats, a message queue and more.

Additionally, we are building out a new media-driven help document library. Using Adobe's Captivate, we are creating a series of narrated mini-movies to walk users through using all of the tools in i3SiteTools. This library accompanied by a robust new glossary of all things "webish" are part of our commitment to make owning and maintaining websites the best possible experience for all users.

D-P.com is Getting a Face-Lift

Yes, it is true, the cobbler's children often go shoeless. We are finally making the time to rework our own web site and have thrown the gauntlet down to launch by the end of January (2006 that is ;-)!

We have nearly killed each other in the planning phase --- everybody gets a little bit passionate about our beloved DP site and the grand vision of what it can be. But that's good, because nothing good ever came from apathy, and you can quote me on that! I figure the last one standing when the dust settles gets to actually build it! Apathy's lookin' better all the time.

Microsoft recently announced they will no longer be supporting or improving upon the Internet Explorer browser for the Macintosh platform.

Eric spends a few moments pondering what this means and what user of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh should do about it.

December 3^rd, 2005 marked a big day for ColdFusion developers and users of Macromedia products. It was on this day that the Adobe / Macromedia merger became official with both parties receiving word they had passed all the red-tape hurdles in their path. You can read more about the happenings on Adobe’s website and here. You can also do a Google search for the merger and get lots of opinions, speculation and more from news organizations and other bloggers.

So what does this mean for Digital Position clients and the future of the Macromedia product line? Well for the foreseeable future not much will be different other than a name change, a logo change, and maybe some product packaging. Work has already begun on the next version of ColdFusion (code named Scorpio) and we’ve learned that the ColdFusion product line (along with FLEX) will be in the “Enterprise and Developer Solutions Business Unit” which handles Adobe's LifeCycle product line.

Here at Digital Positions it’s business as usual and word on the street is that this is only good news for ColdFusion and ColdFusion developers. We’ve already seen Macromedia take the ColdFusion line down new paths by integrating much requested features. Now with the Marketing, Research & Development, and overall reach of Adobe, we can expect more of the same. We are excited about this merger and will keep you up-to-date on the cool and innovative stuff which is sure to come out of it.

1. Return on Investment; or
   
2. Cost of the project?

Back in February of this year (2005) Digital Positions decided it was time to find a new hosting partner for our clients’ websites. This decision was talked about a lot in the months preceding but it wasn’t till February that we actually sat down and started to plan the migration and search for a host. This article describes some of the steps we took to ensure things went smoothly.