As a company originally organized to provide on-site professional software engineering services, RTI recognized that it had a key challenge not faced by most other software development firms. Namely, with its employees distributed, the task of providing tools to automate routine business processes (such as time, expense, and status reporting, among many others) was that much more difficult. So we set out to develop a distributed infrastructure based on XML to handle data interchange with our legacy business systems and a web browser user interface to allow our employees to access these tools from any customer site, or even from home, whether or not they are behind a firewall.

Nowadays, the value of a distributed environment like this is being recognized by both other small, "new economy" companies, as well as large corporate enterprises. They form an integral part of the "e-commerce" and "b2b" systems that are so widely discussed in the industry press. Although it is still a work in progress, as we find new and better ways to take advantage of the available technologies, the dynamic infrastructure we have put in place is allowing us to build a fully integrated set of tools to handle everything from Knowledge Management and Employee Relationship Management, to Enterprise Resource Planning, to Customer Relationship Management.

Listed below are the current capabilities of RAKE, along with a graphical representation of how the pieces fit together.

• New Business Tracking
• Current Customer Tracking
• Customer Portals
• Contract Deadline Tracking
• Status and Time Tracking
• Website Content Management
• Employee Addressbook
• Public File Repository
• Employee Email Notification System
• Per-user Configurability
• Todo List