Info Rhino develops software and solutions which are both desktop based and web server based. Our websites are hosted on web servers and some of our desktop applications are covered on our beta section of the website. Many clients won't want this particular solutions architecture.
This page can be thought of as a living document on how we currently are and intend to license our software. A big part of this is to do with how we want to keep our operations lean and clean for our clients.
This page may be too much information, or may instead prove invaluable for clients and prospective clients.
Viewing our Products and Services section indicates that our website products were written for public facing websites. Enterprise technology, where we have substantial experience, has different use-cases. We are committed to working with enterprises, delivering our quality solutions for their local area networks.
Hosted Websites
Our; Web Data Platform, Website Content Management Systems, and Starter Websites are all intended to be public facing websites. They are ASP.Net MVC and Asp.Net Core MVC. This is how our websites were originally intended to be deployed.
We deploy the application to our hosted web server.
Many clients may want to use our websites (in particular our Web Data Platform) within an intranet environment. Our main concerns with this were as follows;
In-spite of the above potential issues, we are taking a pragmatic approach to letting clients who want our applications on their intranet. We think that Docker, Kubernetes, containerd would serve this purpose. We could put all manner of restrictions into our software to protect the integrity of our efforts but we would rather focus on delivering amazing functionality for clients - whether a public facing website or a local intranet website.
We think that a container of our Web applications is a perfectly reasonable way to go, and may offer clients the opportunity to have a test environment before deploying content and data to the live website.
We have explored this as an option for ourselves and clients. It is possible to create private container images deploying them to a cloud environment. Whilst this is possible it is not advantageous for us to incorporate our technology into existing commercial client server cloud architecture.
This starts to move beyond our focus as a data solutions provider for clients wishing to publish their content freely to an awesome web data platform, and instead becoming a security conscious enterprise focused application. We at Info Rhino respect both perspectives because we have worked in these environments and understand how important data is to clients.
If, however, you want to work with us on these areas and have the resources to help implement the right solution for you, we welcome this initiative.
Equally, if you are an expert in cloud based hosting implementation, we are happy to partner with those wishing to diversify their service offerings.
Our beta section on our website lists multiple applications we are to offer as licensed software but are still identifying the best way to do this. We feel that certain applications will be simply made available and licensed. Other software may be best served as a container application simply accepting data and configuration, and returning outputs.
We suspect that clients will take built environments with their domain specific logic accompanied with our software through a containerised platform. Alternatively, our belief is we can offer executables/cli for our clients in a way which gives them freedom through open source initiatives.
We welcome your inputs into this.
Our technology is largely;
Our environments are developer editions, and any processing is on Test/hosted environments. This means certain software we write does need licensed software. Test assured we work to find ways around this. An example is where we use litedb and not sql server. We do use sql server for our web data platform, but this can be a minimal license. Indeed, our license is covered through our Web hosting provider.
We felt it important to explain our thinking on not only our current software, but planned software, in terms of potential costs.
We may work with packaging/containerisation consultancies and even clients it they have specific expertise in that area to save on effort.