All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.

Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.

The International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH), a non-profit collaboration between the University of Washington and the University of California, San Francisco, came to Freelock for help building an internal system to improve collaboration and communication within their organization. With a headquarters in Seattle and teams spread across the rest of the world working diligently to improve the development of skilled medical workers and health delivery systems an online based intranet is a perfect solution.

We built a system using a heavily customized Open Atrium installation that features separate, private spaces for each country's program. These spaces provide a central location for every level of the program's operation from overall yearly goals down to an individual user's daily tasks.

How would losing your web site affect your business?

That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.

What is an Expert System?

Whatis.com defines an expert system as follows: