Database Driven
"WE ONLY HAD AN INKLING OF WHERE WE WERE GOING."
A&B's initial foray into intranets did not begin with publishing firm policies or creating links to valuable Internet resources. Instead, the firm sought to solve an everyday problem. Its lawyers needed to create a work product retrieval system-one that was user-friendly-and to focus their technology investment on understanding the processes involved rather than on expensive software licensing.

Result: a Web-enabled, full-text database containing a half million documents. The system was easily usable with its point-and-click browser interface. It even had online, computer-based videos (using Lotus' ScreenCam) and documents for training. This system was created using Cold Fusion v1.5 as the middleware environment with a Fulcrum SearchServer database on the back-end. At that time, Cold Fusion did not have its embedded Verity search engine, and SearchServer was a full-text engine accessible by ODBC. The Cold Fusion development environment and web server was loaded on the Fulcrum server. (For more information on this system, the reader may wish to look at the article at http://www.lptc.com/articles/.)

The successful creation of this important legal practice system was fortuitous for the firm. By 1996, it had laid to rest a number of important issues:

• Internet-based systems could be robust and were ready for prime time;
• Internet middleware packages (e.g., Cold Fusion) could help an organization tap into major back-end capabilities;
• The systems were easy to deploy because there was nothing to do on the PC but equip it with a browser;
• Intranets could be an inexpensive dream come true for a cost-conscious enterprise;
• The focus of the intranet systems should be the development of legal practice systems for lawyers.

In short, success with a hard system had paved the way for additional substantive work.

How Did We Get Here?
THE INTERNET PUBLISHING DILEMMA.
In 1996, the firm had put into place a robust set of static Web pages for its intranet. However, it had become clear that too much time and energy was required to maintain these pages. In addition, updates were being forwarded to the technology people, who understood how to craft HTML. This was a problem for several reasons. First, the technology people's time is valuable, and coding HTML is not the best use of a Web applications developer. Second, an information bottleneck had been created. Third, there was no effective way to assess the varying needs of different practice groups; the work was done on a first-come, first-served basis.

By the close of 1996, it had become clear the intranet publishing dilemma must be solved, and quickly. It was not going to be cost-effective to train people in the use of FrontPage or other HTML editing tools. Not only were those tools at the time cryptic; it was simply ridiculous to think any significant number of lawyers would have the time or interest to learn them. It also was clear the kind of information on the firm's Web pages actually comprised a fairly short list of objects: text, URL links, pictures and documents. In short, lawyers, paralegals and staff needed an easier way to add these elements to a page-not another application to learn. They wanted to collaborate, not become gurus in Internet protocols.

It also had become obvious to the software architects that the firm should not focus its efforts solely on the intranet. Of course, extranets in 1996 were unknown to most law firms. No such project was even on the horizon for Alston & Bird. Nevertheless, the goal had become to create a database-driven Web authoring application focused on collaboration within the legal environment. A database and Web-based forms would let lawyers, paraprofessionals and staff easily create new pages and maintain information objects on these pages. Full-text search technology would allow easy location of anything within the intranet/extranet, and simple security would allow any given page to be owned and edited by a specified group of users. Thus, it was envisioned that such a system could be left internal as an intranet or be ported to an external server to act as an extranet.

Pure Oxygen, Pure Collaboration, Extreme Growth
“AGGRESSIVE PUBLISHING.”
In January 1997, the application (code-named "Pure Oxygen") was demoed at Price Waterhouse Cooper's New York LegalTech. (The name was metaphorical of its intended purposes; the oxygen atom always appears in collaboration with another oxygen atom, and oxygen acts as an important ingredient in biological organisms for physical work.) By summer, all static HTML pages were gone; every page of the intranet was being driven from databases.

Pure Oxygen was implemented initially in version 2.0 of ColdFusion. It took advantage of a variety of additional tags, most notably client variables. It was originally implemented using the Fulcrum engine as the database and for full-text retrieval. Since then it was ported to Microsoft Access and the embedded Verity full-text database so that it could be easily distributed. Many of the original SQL queries had to be revised to make the templates compatible with all of the CF v4.0 syntax.