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Patrick Sullivan learned the definition of "growing pains" when his company, Workopolis, tried to launch a new Web-facing infrastructure on its own.

The president of the Toronto-based Web site that bills itself as "Canada's Biggest Job Site" was getting too big for its own good.

Growing from 100,000 users per month in 2002 to close to four million per month in 2007, Sullivan knew it was time for an upgrade from an Oracle-based Web architecture, vintage 1998.

"Our mistake was to move forward a bit too quickly, without planning appropriately," Sullivan says. "We tried to go down the path alone and it wasn't working for us."

In the summer of 2007, Workopolis attempted to launch a site to support three million monthly visitors. But the results weren't good – the site was slow and unresponsive – it was time to call in some expert help, Sullivan says.

So Workopolis turned to imason Inc., a Toronto-based IT consulting firm. The Microsoft Gold Partner provided a team of experts that worked alongside Workopolis staff to train them on .Net development for the Web-facing component.

A one-year plan was mapped out for Workopolis to handle up to five million job seekers per month. A plan that is being accomplished with help from imason's planted staff, and Microsoft's Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio software.

"Our goal was just being able to serve the ever-growing audience that Workopolis has," says Scott Howlett, co-CEO at imason. "They are one of the biggest dot-com properties in Canada."

Before the upgrade, Workopolis was running their Oracle-based Web applications on two large Sun Solaris servers that ran at 80 per cent capacity, Sullivan says. That meant they couldn't afford having one crash. With the shift to .Net, Workopolis moved to two larger IBM servers.

With the new servers, and some help from .Net's ability to decrease capacity load, the Web site is now much more durable. Workopolis still uses an Oracle database, its foundation since starting up eight years ago.

But using the .Net platform to revamp its Web site isn't as important as the fact that Workopolis had the help of an expert developer that was comfortable with the code base, says Howard Kiewe, senior research analyst with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group.

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