Community Portal Environments
The environments and architecture needed to run and develop a consumer focusing web site
The main goal of a consumer facing website is to create a fun, engaging online experience that helps your consumers interact with your product. This is a challenge for people who have come from the business world. The three questions that you need to ask yourself when considering how you make good consumer focused web site are :-
- What is the structure of the production environment?
- What environments do I need to enable change?
- Who will be using each environment?
This diagram shows the set of environments for a basic site.
The first thing to consider is where are you going to assemble the content and features, this is done in the collaboration environment. It is better to use the term “collaboration environment” rather than “development environment” because you want to create an area where technical and non technical team members can share information and work electronically, if you call this a development environment then often the teckies feel that it is for their exclusive use.
The collaboration environment should at minimum offer these services
- Source control, such as SVN or CVS
- File storage
- a wiki {see my wiki recommendation}
- a facility to automatically send and receive emails from SVN and the WIKI
- Search, this depends on the size of your project and team, If you have a large team then get a GSA and point it at all you code, files and storage.
The testing environment is where your features come together for use by the testing team, products are only deployed into testing if all the automatic tests are passed.
The staging environment is more complex, its where features are “staged” before they go live. Essentially its a second round of testing, but using real data. A replica of live data is used in staging.
Finally you have the production environment. This is where content and features ultimately are given to the public.
The most important thing about these environments is that they are there to make it faster to deliver new features. The rate of flow of content and feature between these environments adds to the successfulness of your portal.
This is why it is important to remove any unnecessary steps that slow this down, however if you remove too many steps from your process then you risk delivering features that do not work, which adversely effects the rate of delivery of features. You should aim to operate at the highest acceptable level of risk.
