It's a moonlighting garage project I've been doing with an accountant. It involves coordination and documentation requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley act. We've got a couple of major accounting firms that are lined up with another firm we outsource to do the training.

The purpose of the software is to represent the hierarchy of the teams within the company that set individuals responsible for the hierarchy of accounts, processes, and controls. Basically three trees involved: access control, teams, and accounts all programmatically blended together with dates and statuses to keep tabs on deadlines. In addition, there's requirements for auditors to sign off on each of the nodes.

In many ways it resembles dedicated project management software designed to be fast and friendly for the specific purpose of document tracking. It also is designed to allow coordination of groups both inside and outside the corporation without having to integrate all the widely disparate systems.

Has it been a success? Well, the verdict is still out. I've made a little money (at least I'm on the positive side), with the chance to make more. The success is now in the hands of the marketers, not the technical side. The product is fairly well up to spec, but any software project has customers constantly haranguing you to make it do more (usually at the cost of simplicity).

When I originally wrote the tree handling, I knew it was inefficient but I didn't have time to fix the problem up front. The software was capable of handling a couple hundred nodes, but we had three paying customers come in at about the same time allocating over 2500 nodes each. With that load the process time went from about 1 to 2 seconds, to the 35 to 45 second range. Had to confront and solve the problem within a very short amount of time, or it would have been DOA and out of pocket money.

And at the same time, of course, I've got my day job going on. :-)

Unfortunately hard to do much with two constraints (1). Accountants are extremely legalistic requiring you to sign very constraining arrangements - means I can't discuss much beyond the generalities within something in writing; and (2). Lack of funds - significantly cutting into the list of possible candidates.

And I can't say that I'm proud of the maintenance properties embedded in the software (that's what happens when you don't have time to spend on major projects). We've tried 2 times to lighten my load by bringing in some consultants. In both cases, I spent more time on training than I would have if I just did it myself - wouldn't be true in the long term, but Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is something that's fast approaching.

nothing much to it other than the wide open ability to share directories and files. First problem is that setting up the access control is a major pain. Second problem is that it's fairly flexible (read unstructured). Biggest hassle with it, though, is that its mostly an internal organizational tool. Whereas Sarbanes-Oxley requires coordination between multiple entities (including the accountants/auditers).

Well MS has enuf money, I'm sure they'll make a play. They kicked our tires a while back, but I wasn't willing to integrate with .net or sharepoint. Time will tell.