Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-02-24 08:20:21 - Graham Ellis
In systems terms, extending a system to handle two instances of something rather than one is a major step - much more major than increasing the number of instances handled even from (say) 2 to 200. The latter is just "use a bigger array" whereas with a singleton system that was never planned for growth, it's often a redesign / rewrite.
When we started training at Well House Consultants, we used a number of Singleton systems. That's no error on our part; in our initial years it would have been a huge waste of resources to use more complex and expensive systems that could handle multiple users / input but didn't have to do so. Now that we're growing, though, some of these systems need to be revisited.
Being a company that trains you on Open Source Programming languages (See all our modules described elsewhere), we feel that we should be using them to provide our co-ordination systems too. We're using a wiki (from the Hawaiian language, meaning superfast) internally to keep each other informed / updated on "todo" and "work-in-progress" lists. We've added a Demilitarized zone (DMZ) on our in house network so that staff on the road or working from home can access resources that they need. And we'll have an on line schedule / booking diary that goes rather deeper than "which courses are available when" in the near future.