Amkor Electronics, Inc. is the sales, marketing, and support division of Amkor/Anam, the global leader in semiconductor IC packaging, assembly and test. Amkor/Anam is a multi-national corporation with offices and factories located throughout the United States, Korea, Philippines, France, Singapore, and Japan.

Amkor/Anam's Intranet, dubbed AANet was launched in August of 1996. The current infrastructure consists of Intel based Windows NT servers running Microsoft's IIS, Novell's IntranetWare, a SCO UNIX box, Lotus Notes server with Domino, multiple IBM AS/400s, and a hodgepodge of other UNIX, Novell, and NT based servers. The network backbone is built on a combination of Ethernet and Token Ring technology.

At the time of rollout, the site was nothing more than a collection of static HTML pages and a few Perl scripts for handling specialized tasks such as e-mailing forms and starting ftp sessions. As the site began to grow, a request was made for a searchable version of the company telephone directory. The company phone directory was to be contained in a Microsoft Access database that was to be generated from our main HR system and our Novell GroupWise^TM database.

Once the database was created, the next step was to investigate products that could easily access the information contained in our database. Custom solutions using VisualBasic and Perl were explored but abandoned because of the amount of programming associated with low level languages. Another solution, Microsoft's dbWeb was considered, but evaluations showed that the product was to difficult to customize and did not offer the level of flexibility desired in an application development tool. After evaluating several other products, I came across Allaire's Cold Fusion (v1.5 at the time).

The right tool for the job

From the start I was impressed with CF's ease of use, power, and functionality. I began experimenting with Cold Fusion and found I was able to pick up the basics of Allaire's DataBase Markup Language (DBML) within a few days. The numerous example applications provided with the product as well as the application wizards made the learning process easy. I was able to take the searchable telephone listing project and produce a workable beta in less than one day. Not bad for a project that I was given months to complete!

The quick application turnaround time didn't end with the searchable telephone directory. After the initial success of that project, others were defined and developed with similar results. Projects that were being developed using traditional client/server tools were taking up to 100 times longer to complete than comparable applications being developed using Cold Fusion.

Not long after I began using version 1.5 of Cold Fusion, Allaire released version 2.0. This new version contained many improvements over version 1.5 including a more powerful markup language, CFML [Cold Fusion Markup Language]. Although similar to v1.5's DBML, the new language contained hundreds of new tags and functions as well as greater extensibility. Cold Fusion 2.0 opened up a whole new vista of application development possibilities.

Managing success

By November of 1996, AANet was growing exponentially. With this unprecedented growth came some unique site management challenges. Many of our departments had hundreds of documents that were accessible via HTML based menus on their departmental pages. These files existed in many different formats including but not limited to HTML, Adobe PDF, and Microsoft^® Word^TM, PowerPoint^TM, and Excel^TM. Some of the menus listing these files were becoming too large to be used effectively.

Besides menu related problems, many of the documents were frequently updated and new ones were constantly being added. This presented two other problems, how to allow users to update files and/or menus and how to let users know when files have been updated or added.

Giving departmental administrators the ability to update some of their own content was a high priority. The idea of creating a crude file management system for some of the various departments was kicked around and quickly approved.

The first project was for an application our Design Center wanted. They had information on over 5,000 design specifications contained in an Access database. The specification list database contained information such as the specifications number, revision number, effective date, and the specifications title. The Design Center also had a substantial number of the specifications listed in the database available as Microsoft Word files. The filenames of the Word documents corresponded to the specification numbers contained in the database. This scenario made for a simple yet effective web based application.

Cold Fusion was used to create two sets of templates which made up the application. The first set of templates controlled the administrative functions of the application. A series of forms were created which allowed the specification list administrator to add, edit, and delete records in the database.

In addition, the administrator was given the ability to attach files to the HTML forms using HTTP file upload and a Netscape browser. In this way, the administrator could add a new record as well as the corresponding Word version of the specification to the database.

The second set of templates were designed to let end users search the massive specification list database. Another HTML form was created that contained a drop down list box for the specification type, and text boxes for the specification number and specification title. Users could search the database based on the entries in the HTML form. These parameters were passed to another Cold Fusion template which ran the query against the database and returned a results set in the form of a HTML table. If a Word version of the specification existed on the server, a small Word icon was included next to the record which the user could click on to download the specification directly into Microsoft Word.

Computer-aided evolution

Letting users know that new content was available on AANet or that content had been updated was another dilemma that had to be addressed. Again, a database was created with two fields, one for the date and a memo field for text. A Cold Fusion application was created to allow an administrator to manually input new items into the database. An HTML form was created that allowed the administrator to add, edit, and delete entries into this "What's New" database. New entries consisted of entering HTML marked up text into the memo field, and the current date which was automatically inserted into the database. This text was usually a small summary of the new information added or updated as well as a link to the appropriate file or page.

This sort of application worked well for a while, but as the Intranet grew, so did the number of daily entries into the "What's New" database. With this in mind, several existing applications such as the Specification List database were modified to automatically update the "What's New" database every time a change was made. Automatic updating of new information has proved to be a great time saver in the continuing site management battle.

With the "What's New" administrative application in place, another template was created to allow users to see exactly what was being updated. From the main menu on AANet, users can click on a link to What's New, and have a list of the 100 most recent updates displayed to them almost instantly.

AANet is constantly evolving and new applications are being planned and designed on a daily basis. Currently, there are 37 applications on AANet which were built using Cold Fusion. Everything from user satisfaction surveys, what's new, company news, and press releases to specification listings, dynamic menus, a fully searchable knowledge base and our PC inventory. Future plans include a corporate media library complete with check in and check out, automatic e-mail of updates, and a patent search database. With the release of Cold Fusion 3.0 right around the corner, the possibilities are unlimited.

[Read Rob Bilson's review in IDM of CF3.0beta.]