intranet
Large legacy VB.NET Web Forms intranet portal for Travel Counsellors staff and franchisees, covering conferences, commercial content, people/HR, stats and many other internal functions.
Health score
0 to 100 across seven weighted factors; nothing is hidden. Green is 75 and above, amber 50 to 74, red below 50. How scoring works.
Facts
| Languages | vbnet, sql, javascript |
| Frameworks | ASP.NET Web Forms, AjaxControlToolkit |
| Runtimes | .NET Framework 4.6.2 |
| Tests / CI | none / CI in place |
| Last commit | 2026-05-19 |
| Owner | Owner unknown (mapping to be curated) |
| Domain | Agent tools and community (system generated; curate in repo-owners.json to override) |
| Product area | Phenix |
| Hosted | On-prem Deployed to our own machines
|
| Releases | 1 release pipeline(s): \Intranet\intranet |
| Integration | soap |
| Source | Open in Azure DevOps |
Risk flags
Each flag links to its glossary definition.
Dependencies in context
Entanglement
loosely attached Bound into the core by 1 mechanism(s).
- Shares core database sqlserver:ContactCentre
Detaches when the shared database group it belongs to gains an owned API or completes schema separation (sqlserver:ContactCentre).
Depends on / used by
Migration playbooks
Generated from this repo's assessment data: what is feasible, what blocks it, and the steps in order. Ratings: green means actionable now, amber means sequence other work first, red means blocked, grey means not applicable.
ZDD adoption
A long roadTechnically eligible one day, but the blockers are structural: hosted WCF or SOAP contracts that cannot run two versions at once, or heavy legacy coupling. Sequence the modernisation work first. Legacy web front end: session state and framework age make mixed-version fleets risky until state is externalised.
- Shares sqlserver:ContactCentre with 8 system(s): destructive schema change is prohibited in a single release; expand and contract only
- Adopt the four-stage discipline from the ZDD engineering standard: pre-deployment compatibility, deployment, feature activation behind a flag, post-release cleanup.
- Raise automated test coverage first: ZDD trades the end-of-sprint manual gate for continuous automated confidence, so the tests are the entry ticket.
- Make every change dual-version safe: backwards-compatible APIs (new major version for breaking wire changes), expand and contract for any schema change, and consumers tolerant of unknown fields.
- Audit serialized data: anything in Redis, queues or shared caches must deserialize cleanly across adjacent versions.
- Externalise any remaining session state so users can move between nodes mid-session without disruption.
- Wrap behaviour changes in feature flags so code deploys dark and release becomes a business decision, not a deployment event.
- Route deployments through the Workflow Engine's automated drain, deploy, health-check, return cycle (the path proven by the first automated production run in mid-2026).
- Verify with area-scoped regression rather than the whole-platform cycle, and watch error rates after rollout with automated rollback on alert.
SQL Server exit
Blocked by a shared core databasesqlserver:tcdb, sqlserver:TravelCounsellors, sqlserver:MediaServer, sqlserver:ContactCentre, sqlserver:IntranetMIS, sqlserver:Teams, sqlserver:CommissionService, sqlserver:DataWarehouse, sqlserver:Accounts are shared, so this system cannot change engine on its own: every sharer moves in convoy. The stage 4 work (named owner, declarative schema, owned API) has to land first; after that, the steps below apply to whatever slice this system ends up owning.
- sqlserver:tcdb is shared with 1 other system(s)
- sqlserver:TravelCounsellors is shared with 4 other system(s)
- sqlserver:MediaServer is shared with 4 other system(s)
- sqlserver:ContactCentre is shared with 8 other system(s) and is a core database
- sqlserver:IntranetMIS is shared with 1 other system(s)
- sqlserver:Teams is shared with 1 other system(s)
- sqlserver:CommissionService is shared with 1 other system(s)
- sqlserver:DataWarehouse is shared with 3 other system(s)
- sqlserver:Accounts is shared with 2 other system(s)
- Inventory the schema and query surface of sqlserver:tcdb, sqlserver:TravelCounsellors, sqlserver:MediaServer, sqlserver:MediaManagement, sqlserver:ContactCentre, sqlserver:MarketingData, sqlserver:IntranetMIS, sqlserver:Conference, sqlserver:Teams, sqlserver:CommissionService, sqlserver:DataWarehouse, sqlserver:Accounts: tables, stored procedures, triggers, cross-database joins and anything else engine-specific.
- Confirm the target: PostgreSQL (relational model; keep transactions and joins, swap the engine).
- Replatform to modern .NET first (see the recommended actions): current PostgreSQL and MongoDB drivers and EF Core providers target modern .NET, and doing one risky change at a time is cheaper than doing two.
- Data access is not through an ORM, so port the SQL by hand: translate T-SQL constructs, replace stored procedures with application code or target-native equivalents, and add integration tests around the queries that matter first.
- Stand up the target alongside SQL Server, backfill with an ETL pass (pgloader or an export/import job), then dual-write or replicate until parity is proven.
- Move reads to the target, watch correctness and latency, then cut writes over and keep SQL Server read-only until confidence is earned.
- Decommission the SQL Server database and remove the connection strings and firewall paths that pointed at it.
Containerisation
Feasible after replatformingAppropriate, but the .NET Framework runtime has to go first; container work rides along with the replatform rather than preceding it.
- .NET Framework only runs on Windows; practical (Linux) containers need modern .NET
- Replatform to modern .NET first (see the recommended actions). Containerising then becomes routine.
- Add a Dockerfile and make the app read all configuration from environment variables and the secrets manager, never from machine-local files.
- Log to stdout and expose a health check endpoint so ECS can supervise it.
- Adopt the shared ci.yml pipeline template with the container parameters (awsRegion, containerAfterBuild, ecsTerraformRepo), which is exactly how the estate's existing AWS services deploy.
- Define the service in the Terraform repo, deploy to a non-production environment, then shift traffic and disarm the deployment-group release pipeline.
Recommended actions
Rotate the credentials committed to intranet
Risk flags indicate credentials or keys in source (secrets-in-source). Rotate now and enable secret scanning in CI; this is independent of all other work.
Impact: Closes a live security exposure at near-zero cost
proposedReplatform intranet to modern .NET
Runs on .NET Framework 4.6.2, out of mainstream support. No pinning dependency blocks it; sequence by fan-in (providers before consumers). Shares sqlserver:ContactCentre, so batch it with its database group (stage 4).
Impact: Reduces the end-of-life runtime count
proposedAssessment notes
intranet
Purpose
The staff/franchisee intranet: a single ~6,400-file VB.NET Web Forms site with dozens of functional areas (Conference, Commercial, Cruise, Educationals, People/HR incl. e-signatures and new-starter programme, Challenge, Graphs/Stats reporting, Mosaic, Administration). Still actively maintained.
Tech stack
VB.NET ASP.NET Web Forms (Intranet.vbproj) on .NET Framework 4.6.2, with vendored third-party binaries in 3rdPartyControls/ (AjaxControlToolkit, Coalesys PanelBar, InterAKT, Flash interop DLLs). Two SQL Server database projects (Tcdb, TravelCounsellors) live alongside in src/Databases.
Deployment
One build pipeline (intranet, build-intranet.yml on shared templates v1.0, building the site plus the tcdb and TravelCounsellors database projects) and one release pipeline \Intranet\intranet.
Dependencies
No internal TC NuGet packages detected; data access is direct ADO.NET against shared databases. Outbound SOAP/HTTP calls exist in scattered code-behind files (e.g. Mosaic client service, conference management) but targets were not conclusively mapped to estate repos.
Data stores
Twelve SQL Server connection strings including the core shared tcdb and TravelCounsellors databases plus ContactCentre, CommissionService, Teams, DataWarehouse and others — extensive shared-database coupling across the estate. Web.config also holds legacy ad-hoc connections (recruitment, 2003/2004 holiday guide databases).
Integration points
Server-rendered pages and .ashx AJAX handlers; some legacy SOAP/HttpWebRequest client calls. No message bus.
Code health
No automated tests (only a _DeveloperTests pages folder). CI builds exist. Plaintext SQL credentials are committed in Web.config. README is boilerplate. Repo is 1.8 GB with binaries checked in. Last commit 2026-05-19 — actively changed despite its age.
Modernisation risks
Highest-effort item in this batch: an actively used Web Forms monolith on .NET Framework 4.6.2 with no direct migration path to modern .NET, no tests to protect a rewrite, deep coupling to at least twelve shared databases, committed secrets, and dead technology (Flash interop, 2004-era guide databases). Recommend incremental strangler-style extraction of active areas rather than a big-bang rewrite, plus immediate secret rotation and removal from source.