Since yesterday has the potential to be a hallmark day for Equation Research (more on that in a second), I thought I would end my blogging procrastination and get the Technology blog up and going. My hope is to use this as a forum for communication especially as it pertains to what is happening in the EQR technosphere.

So yesterday was an interesting day in that fellow colleague Gyepi Sam and I agreed to give Ruby On Rails the official green light for prototyping the next version of the application we call "The Platform". I've never been a fan of that name for an application, because I think of platform as referring to hardware or OS. For example, I think of Windows, OS X, and Unix/Linux as platforms. I'd much prefer more marketing friendly names that describe the individual components of the application. So to clarify, the "Platform" application is really composed of a Survey Authoring piece (sets up the survey), a Survey runtime engine (allows users to respond to a survey questionnaire), and a reporting tool for both internal/external use to "view" the survey while it is underway - aka "Real Time Reporting". What I would propose is something like "Composer", "Runtime", and "Spotlight or Inspector". This doesn't limit all the other things to come into play, but I really see those as subsystems (with the exception of the Email Blaster).

At any rate, we have a consensus internally on a path to take for the next version, which should give us a nice little boost in moving forward.