7 Questions With a 20+ Year Oscript Programmer

Syntergy has been developing solutions for Content Server for over 18 years. One veteran employee has been working with Oscript for 25 years and another for 21! Our top systems analysts has been involved with Content Server since 1997. This level of experience and dedication is one of the reasons that Syntergy has been in the Content Server business for so long and why Syntergy is recognized around the world as one of the leading providers solutions for Content Server. In this article we ask Tyler Lawton 7 questions about his experiences developing Content Server solutions.

1. How long have you been working with Content Server?
   
   I started in 1995 when I was an employee at Qualcomm in San Diego. We were the first enterprise company to buy Content Server. Back then it was called Livelink and it was a client server application. The internet and intranets were really just getting started.
2. Can you describe what Content Server was like 20 years ago?
   
   Obviously it was significantly different. The core that was Livelink was the Oscript programming language. It was used by a company called Odesta Systems to build custom document management systems for small companies. They used that foundation to build a generic document management system that could be sold to large companies and then customized to meet specific needs.
3. Are you surprised at Content Server has grown?
   
   There was a vision of having some functionality run on a web browser. I remember seeing a list of documents in a folder displayed on a web browser. It was almost like magic back then. To see the functionality that is has now on the browser is amazing. The other thing is the wide spread adoption of Content Server. I used to be able to recite all the companies that were using it in the early days.
4. What's surprised you the most about the evolution of Content Server?
   
   I am surprised at the growth of the user base. When you think about starting out as the first customer ever and then see how many thousands of organizations are using it now it is amazing. The other thing is the number of industries that use Content Server. It has proven to be a very flexible and powerful application.
5. You must know a lot about Oscript after all these years?
   
   I feel like I know more about Oscript than anything else in my life! We have quite a few people at Syntergy that are more than experts at Oscript. I used to joke with our guys and call it "The Livelink" like the program was alive and trying to make life hard for us. I can honestly say I have never lost to "The Livelink". It's more a testament to not giving up on a problem than anything else.
6. What's the hardest thing you have had to program for Content Server?
   
   Without a doubt it was the development of Replicator. We had a customer come ask Syntergy to build a replication solution for them. We first told them it was a crazy idea. But they insisted we come down to Australia and talk about it and by the time we left we were convinced that we could do it. It took some real innovative thinking but it has been a great product used by an amazing number of organizations.
7. What's your favorite thing you have developed for Content Server?
   
   I think it was my first Syntergy product which was called Multi-File Add. The first customer was AT&T Wireless in Seattle and they insisted they needed to drag and drop files from their desktop into the browser. This was back in 1997 when most of the people in the world didn't know what a browser was. The leading browser at the time was Netscape and they had this little known feature that let you drag files into a browser pointed at an ftp site. I was able to use some tricks to make it look like a user was dragging files right into Content Server through the browser.

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