I was hired to work for Coremetrics to manage their demo system for their Software as a Service (SaaS) Online Web Analytics reporting suite. During my time there I designed a Portable Demo System that utilized a self contained Apache/PHP/MySQL server that could be distributed via a zip file. After unzipping the file a user simply double clicked an .exe file to start the server, no installation or configuration was needed on the user’s computer.
This Portable Demo system contained a completely dynamic copy of the Online Anayltics Application and provided ~90% of the functionality of the real product. The Portable Demo system allowed the user to change the data stories within the demo via Excel in order to better demonstrate the power of individual features and the overall product. The system was designed to accommodate multiple data sets for different industries along with support for Localization and Internationalization.
While I initially was the only designer/developer of this project I grew to become the project lead as a team of 5 developers was developed to complete the initial 1.0 release. The project spanned 2 of the 3 years that I worked for Coremetrics and proved to be an invaluable sales tool for the company.
The demo project that worked on was an internal project and is not available to the general public for viewing. The Coremetrics website can be viewed at coremetrics.com.