Sunday, June 30, 2002

Welcome to Our On Location Weblog We're glad to have you here. Over the course of the next few months, our friends at Life Time Fitness will bring you their trials and triumphs as they roll out a nationwide Web Services application to their 400,000 some-odd fitness club members. In their day-to-day postings, we hope you'll gain a candid look inside an aggressive IT department. In case you're wondering just who these guys are, take a read through our case study on Life Time Fitness. Just published today, this in-depth report follows the Life Time crew over the course of two years. As author Dave Joachim puts it: This is the inside story of a midsize fitness club operator that continues to overhaul its application infrastructure to help the company grow 50 percent per year. At the center of that activity is the two-year-old, custom-developed MMS, which Life Time uses to track customer demographics, provide daily field reports for operations managers and finance executives, conduct electronic funds transfer for bill collection, and offer one-second check-in for club members. The system also takes advantage of a Web services platform--built on Java 2 Enterprise Edition tools, a BEA Systems application server and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interfaces--to connect member records with an ASP-provided online scheduling application. While you're on this weblog, be sure to submit your comments on each post (believe me, they are reading these things). We also invite you to send in your technical (and even business/political questions) to the Life Time IT department. Enjoy yourself, and thanks for reading. Brad Shimmin Posted by Life Time Fitness at 11:03:18 PM   comment on this post  >>[]   post forum questions >>