Business Challenge
On contract to SPAWAR supporting design and development of the Navy Marine Corps Portal (NMCP), which is transforming the US Navy. We customized COTS products and custom government software to produce the web-enabled architecture the Navy has already begun to utilize.
 

Results
Today, the NMCP is being used by thousands of sailors and Navy personnel, and will eventually be used by hundreds of thousands, and is being installed on 300 ships and numerous ashore installations worldwide.
 

Implimentation
- Deployed the one only enterprise portal solution in the Navy that operates in the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), Information Technology for the 21st Century (IT-21), and Base-Level Information Infrastructure (BLII).
- Provided the first-ever single guidance document for the Web service: the Navy Enterprise Application Developers Guide.
- Installed on ships from the USS Theodore Roosevelt Battle Group, COMSECONDFLT, Fleet and shore NOCs in Hawaii.
- Tested and integrated over 100 Web services into the NMCP.
 

Year 2001

The U.S. Navy Portal started as "Task Force Web."  Our team developed the first U.S. Navy Portal. This is a capture of the first test template.

Year: 2000

 Early take on the home page, displaying business and community life on the ship.

With the ability to customize templates, "every ship's gonna want it's own custom version!"

900 pixels by 600 pixels were the working dimensions for the portal on most computers at that time. Real estate was extremely valuable. Plus, many users didn't use their browsers at full screen, reducing their work-space even more!  To maximize a users work-space on the portal, we had to cut fat; and that fat was easiest to reduce in the header's height to display more content.  

Retired Captain, Mike Jennings, who initialed the DoN Enterprise Portal, continually asked me to maximize data and content by making the most "wafer thin" header I could:  He always made a really good argument for maximizing real estate for information over branding:   "I understand branding is important, but the header, for us, should primarily be a navigation tool.  Too many commercial websites take up too much space servicing themselves with HUGE headers, which forces users to scroll a quarter of a page down before they can get to the data they're looking for--a total waste of good real estate.  We need to maximize that data with rich 'enterprise services', instead of advertising our brand." 

In 2001, the Internet (especially a portal!) was still a very new concept to most.  We wanted to make sure users didn't miss the opportunity to learn how to use it; therefore, a set of interactive set of user friendly tutorials were created with Macromedia Flash. To ensure the tutorials were exposed to users upon their first visit to the portal, Bill Adist, a usability expert, requested that upon every user's first login to the portal, a pop-up window advertising the tutorials, with a simple "click here", was available to them.  I added the same tutorial icon that was on the home page to the pop-up window's offering. That way a clear association could--hopefully--be made in the user's memory to look for the same enterprise 'service' again.

Since most people had never seen a sliding panel before (now called Carousels), we started with a tutorial to show how to use it.  The tutorial was all hand-animated in Flash. This is before Adobe Captivate existed; and Camtasia at the time, produced huge QuickTime files. I had to stick to the manual approach.  I produced both a Flash tutorial and a HTML version. 

Depending on which template a user chose, or was assigned them (based on their working environment), the portal would load a different set of style and images kept in their own specific directory for each template.