Our development process and platform differentiate us from the others in our field. All of our work is done in parallel, in our database-driven environment, with a built-in version control and workflow system. What does this mean to you?

Top Quality, Fast Turnaround and Cost-Effective Solutions

The foundation of the Xtential process is our use of Intranets and Extranets. The Intranet houses our development platform and associated tools, and the various project and client assets. The Extranet is accessible for clients to view their work-in-progress and its supporting documents. This proven development approach is used regardless of the project type: interactive media piece, application, and banner ad, or complete Web site.

All of our development is done in-house utilizing the software architecture outlined in the previous section. On the rare occasions when we need to supplement our staff with external resources (e.g. copywriters or additional production aid), the outside individuals also tap into our development system. This gives us the control over development and quality assurance needed to produce the highest quality work consistently. The tools that our developers use include Photoshop, Illustrator, Homesite, BBEdit, Visual Interdev, Perl, C, Visual Basic, Cold Fusion, Shockwave Flash, Director, JavaScript, VBScript, SQL, Access, SQL Server, Oracle, PL/SQL, DHTML.

We have developed a sophisticated network that is designed to be scalable, secure and high in performance and redundancy.

Our servers host client sites, client Extranet, and Oracle database applications. Our Intranet is secured by a firewall, and contains our development platform, file server, email server, and staff workstations. We host many platforms, such as Solaris, Linux, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 98, and MacOS, which enables us to provide solutions for wide variety of platforms and environments. The majority of our hosting is provided on Sun Solaris machines (Oracle, Cold Fusion, Perl, C) Linux (Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP) and Windows NT (Access, SQL server, Cold Fusion, Visual Basic, Active Server Pages). Web server software packages that we use include Netscape Enterprise, Microsoft Internet Information Server, and Apache.

Our applications are scrutinized during QA for security and performance. We monitor security at our firewall to protect the database server.

Our testing and development environments are one and the same. Refer to above information about our development environment for details. We stage our work on a secure server for QA, testing, and debugging, and then deploy the final results to the production server. All development and testing is done in-house by Xtential's full-time employees.

We establish our maintenance pricing based on a yearlong commitment, but contracts can be cancelled with one month's notice with no penalty. Our turnaround time is a negotiable part of our agreement. Most of our clients require 24 hour turnaround for press releases and time sensitive material, 3-5 days for other maintenance requests.