InfoWorld Top 100 IT projects of 2004

A colleague sent around a link to InfoWorld’s write-up of their top 100 IT projects for 2004: “As judges, our editors have an explicit bias toward multiple technologies used in innovative ways to serve well-defined business goals.”

 

The web site links to profiles of 7 of the projects.  4 of those relied on MS technology, including the projected voted as tops in 2004, the UPS package flow initiative.

 

UPS: “The package flow software was developed in-house using COM+ components written in C, C++, and Visual Basic running on Windows 2000 Server. SQL Server maintains the planning, real-time sort, and post-sort reporting databases. […]Callagee explains. “We needed it to scale very easily from one little PC to several servers.””

 

Mary Kay: “Another benefit is real-time visibility into financial data — accessible through a portal powered by Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services — which gives accounting executives up-to-the-minute information to take to the boardroom. […]The project required extensive integration of real-time transactional information between new and legacy systems, calling for an IT support team of no less than 40 people to pull it off. Microsoft’s BizTalk provided the XML integration platform”

 

BP: “a homegrown, exception-based application built on Microsoft’s .Net platform aggregates and analyzes all the data.”

 

FedEx Kinko’s: “users can now print directly from their Windows desktops to the FedEx Kinko’s location down the block […]Rather than developing a whole new application from scratch, FedEx linked together various existing internal and external Web services through the .Net platform”