I started working for an "up and coming" web agency in early 1999 who had a
really good reputation in Cincinnati and had started building a name for itself throughout the
Midwest. I was employee #12. Over the next couple of years the company
grew with the dotcom craze and crashed like everyone else. People who I enjoyed working with and
left lasting impressions with me moved on. Sad story, but you've heard it before, right?
Right.
So what does this have to do with this "Digger Solutions" thing? "Digger" has been my nickname since i was a kid so "Digger
Solutions" was the corporate image I have adopted. The Digger Solutions' website has been around in some form or another since 1995, but
mostly it has just been my playground for experimentation.
Okay, okay, I'll get on with the story. On the first day that I started working
at the infamous web agency, the company "intranet" was placed in my lap. It was basically just
a little application for recording time to projects. Over the next two years project managers,
executives, and almost everyone else in the company requested new things to be added, like
reports, invoice tracking, vacation tracking and about everything else you can think of. It
grew into a nice little application, though it did need some cleaning up, which of course was
never done - you know how it is: internal work is always the last thing on your plate when there
is billable work to do. Several times there was talk about turning it into an application we
could sell and at one point we even worked in conjuction with a couple of other web agencies who
had similar tools to build a great mother of an application that really did do everything.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately depending on how you look at it) not one of the existing
applications was chosen to be the base, we decided to build from scratch. The mother of all
intranets was eventually tabled during rough times and I'm sure may never see the light of day,
though I wish someone would finish it up - it was a nice app. Like I said before, the company I
worked for succombed to the tech death the same as most everyone else and I was left with nothing
but great ideas for an intranet that did not exist anymore (other than in my head).
Now I can't take credit for all the ideas that built this product - there was a lot
of input over the years. Additionally, I "borrowed" parts and pieces of code from other things
people who I have worked with have done (like the calendar and the discussion board). A couple of the
guys even continue to help me get it ready for prime time. But I can say that I've always been the
driving force behind the application and I have always considered it mine.
As I worked on other projects recently (over the last year), I always found
myself going back to my intranet idea and rebuilding it more to my tastes and ideas. I scrapped ideas
for the more obscure parts and the things that I felt were unique to our business model only, I added
things into it that I felt it needed, and I automated some of the tasks that we had just done manually
before - like the employee directory. Some of the things I removed will probably eventually make it
back in, like the hardware/software inventory module and the vacation tracker, but I felt that I had
to cut it down to a manageable size or else I would never finish it. Getting it ready for public
consumption has been difficult enough to this point without trying to push out "bloatware" with the
initial release.
Am I pleased with the end result? It is pretty darned good. If I was
shopping for an intranet, I would buy it.
If it is so good, why am I giving it away? I happened upon a shopping cart
system a while back built with ASP. It was
Comersus Cart Open Source, a very nice
product and I decided to download it and try it out. It setup very easy, it was easy to use, and
easy to customize. I wondered why they gave away their software. His story is very similar to
mine - something he had developed for somebody he worked for previously and it really wasn't
doing anyone any good just sitting on the shelf. The thing is: it's a very crowded market out
there. For me to be able to make the money for all the time I've put into it, I would have to
sell it at a pretty good price and offer all kinds of support, etc., and I'd probably end up just
losing my butt.
So that is the story behind Digger Solutions.