The real estate and relocation businesses of Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services are distinct from each other in several ways. But there is no reason that their Web site IT architectures have to be.

That’s one of the first things David Quine noticed when he joined PRERS as a technical architect in the fall of 2005. At the time, the two businesses had 13 Web sites, interacting with 400 applications. Quine and his team estimated 50 percent to 70 percent data replication.

“I saw right away here was an opportunity to cut,” Quine says.

To streamline the system, a new framework was built in .NET 2.0.

“Basically, we gutted the system,” he says.

.NET was chosen based on its security and personalization features as well as the fact that it would allow the company to leverage internal resources.

Right around the first of this year, the new framework was launched. The application count had been trimmed from 400 to 300 by the time of the launch of the .NET Framework. (The term application is used loosely, Quine notes, as the array of applications in the initial group varied from minor database accesses to much larger applications.) The goal is to get the application count down to 100 within five years.

“I think that will be decent savings – 75 percent,” Quine says.

Although it’s early to begin to measure the effects of the new platform, Quine says there have been savings in cost, and usage is way up.

Among the ways Quine and his team have streamlined and consolidated in the process of replacing the framework is by looking for commonalities between the needs of the two businesses’ Web infrastructures. For example, while security was an obvious issue that could be best handled uniformly by both businesses, there were many other opportunities for consolidation as well.

“For example, exceptions – there were several different ways that exceptions were handled in code; there was no consistency,” Quine says. Another example was document management. Both businesses had needs for document management and imaging.

In addition, executives would put presentations up online, but there was no way of knowing how often they were downloaded, Quine says. The team improved instrumentation in terms of monitoring and reporting.

There have been some glitches since the first of the year in the rollout, but they have mainly been around getting users to adopt new business processes.

“At this point, the challenges are just getting everyone’s mind around what the changes are. We’re really changing processes here,” Quine says.

For example, in connection with the framework, the company has added a new CRM system, from Microsoft CRM. Whereas, previously, there may have been 15 different subgroups of users each accessing different databases, there is now one view of the customer. But while more information may be available to users, this type of change comes with a learning curve for users who were familiar with the processes for accessing the more limited databases they had previously used.

Despite learning curves and challenges of new processes, the system must have already delivered some positives to users because usage is “through the roof,” Quine says.

Moving forward, there are other technologies Quine and his team at PRERS expect to add, including ASP.NET AJAX to help make the framework more efficient and interactive. For example, AJAX can help give the Web sites more of a “suggestion mentality” much the way Google does when it offers a drop down menu of suggested searches as the first few typed letters are recognized, says Quine. This technology helps users cut the time of having to look through long lists.

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