The Portage Program

The Portage Program is one of North America's leading organizations in the treatment of drug abuse and character disorders. The treatment approach is based on the principles of the therapeutic community: people helping people and self-help. Portage has helped to establish treatment centers in Europe, Asia and elsewhere in North America.

As we are a non-profit organization and in respect for our many donators, we have the responsibility to get the maximum benefit from every dollar we spend.

We have chosen DXperience suite as our components suite for our .NET development.

As head of a very small IT department, I have to face many challenges. One of them is the maintenance of outdated information systems developed more than ten years ago. Over that period of time, our organization has tripled in size and it has opened specialized programs. The information systems in place didn't adapt well to those change so we decided to replace them. It was decided to develop an "in house" solution so that we may get systems that answer exactly our needs.

The new system should answer the administrative needs but it should also be able to evolve to a complete clinical/medical file management system.

Because we cannot afford to change our tools or to buy extra tools in the middle of the development, and because we need tools that will answer needs not yet defined, we want components that are as complete and versatile as possible. We also need a suite of components that is web based and windows based as we will have a mixed system.

Before making our choice, we searched the web to get the opinions of experienced developers. DevExpress tools are always amongst the first choices. We found it got the best reviews. So we downloaded the trial version and started to develop some interface prototypes to see if we were comfortable with that choice. Our trial period confirmed that the suite is not only very complete but also full of rich and very versatile features. Yet they are developer-friendly enough for a small team like our.

The degree to which these components (and especially - for our needs - those found in the XtraGrid and XtraReports Suite) can be tailored to different needs is impressive.

The data-aware components are said to be amongst the fastest, and our tests proved this to be correct. The reporting tools are powerful yet simple to use.

Our clients are not technical people but therapists and social workers. They are very sensible to the usability and to the visual aspect of the applications. The DXperience suite of components will allow us to design interfaces that are visually beautiful and easy to use.

The fact that the product is delivered with the source code makes there possibilities virtually limitless.

We are looking forward to building our applications with these tools.

We are confident that the client experience will be stunning, both visually and functionally.