The Rainbow project (RainbowPortal)

Running a site, when we thought of Rainbow, wasn’t for everyone. Webmasters made a lot of invoices for content management while we wanted to make the customer independent not so much for philanthropy but to be able to manage many more customers.

Rainbowis a content management system born in 2002 when CMS was only spoken for Linux. Microsoft released one of its products and some parts distributed the sources in VB and C # versions.

Emmanuele chose C# and the adventure began. I proposed this solution to our customers who were enthusiastic about being able to manage their site without depending on the “webmaster” mythological figure and crazy biller of those years.

The product needed a name. Emmanuele was delighted by a book he had just finished reading, “the Rainbow six” … Rainbow was born.

After a short time we decided to put it in open source. It was a controversial choice. It is always complicated to take the work you have done and on which you have often spent nights, on which you trust for the growth of your company and to provide services to your customers and make it available for free even for the “next door competitor”.

In altri termini, everyone uses open source but how many are willing to put their work in open source?

This is the Internet and the approach is often innovative and collaborative, like Due Metri. The only “competitor next door” contacted us and we started a collaboration that still lasts many years later.

In a short time Rainbow incorporated many similar projects becoming the world standard in the Microsoft environment for this type of products. Of course C #.

At the point of maximum expansion, there were groups for localization (translation into various languages ​​… 26 if I remember correctly, including Farsi, Mandarin Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic), groups of coders, groups of graphs to create themes, they contacted us from England to write a book about this experience.

We saw Rainbowas a tool used by the Idaho Department of Labor as a front end for the Iranian statewide or post office site.

Managing a site had never been easier, especially for those who used Microsoft products

When we asked ourselves the problem of data security, we were contacted by an American coder residing in the Gaza Stripwho had used Rainbow for the management of the documentation between the two souls of the Palestinian state, separated from each other and in great need of security systems. efficient.

In 2005 we organized the first (and unfortunately only) meeting of Rainbow coders in Sanremo, at Villa Nobel. Friends from 13 nations participated, including Uruguay, the USA and Canada as well as England, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal just to name a few.

We started from an idea, we had developed it in our office of 20 square meters, with a small window and a large door, a few steps from the sea, in an eighteenth-century fisherman’s house made of stone in Arma di Taggia, the outskirts of the world. We are still in that office 🙂

This both work and human experience (we met hundreds of great people and managed communities) had consequences with Microsoft allowing us to work together with an other project, we were chosen as one of the 30 companies outside the US with the right to develop with them, with an office in Redmond and many other things … but that’s another story.

If this story intrigued you, this is the documentreleased by Microsoft after the collaboration (here the original .doc version from the Microsoft site). Many companies and people work with Microsoft, we can say that Microsoft has worked with Due Metri. Subtle but significant difference