Patrick Debois

Current

• Multimedia Researcher at VRT
• Researcher at VRT Medialab

Past

• Technical Coordinator at Notary Federation Brussels
• System Architect/Technical Consultant at Ministerie van Financiën
• System Architect/Technical Consultant/Technical Project Manager (Sun) at swITch

• System Architect/Technical Project Manager (ACA-IT) at Eurocontrol
• System Architect/Technical Analyst at Ministerie Vlaamse Gemeenschap (EDS)
• System Architect/Technical Project Manager at Ministerie Vlaamse Gemeenschap (SBS)
• System Architect/Technical Project Manager at Proxis (Porthus)
• System Architect at Fedex (Porthus)
• System Architect at Fedict (SBS)
• System Architect/Technical Project Manager at Ministerie Vlaamse Gemeenschap (SBS)
• Wetenschappelijk medewerker at Ghent University

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Education

• Katholieke Hogeschool Mechelen
• Universiteit Gent

Recommended

1 person has recommended Patrick

Connections

315 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Patrick Debois’s Summary

Can act as a technical project manager, expert, pre-sales, team-leader or architect. He is a team motivator and has a great sense for initiative. Analytic and solution oriented with a high determination to deliver professional quality and achieve customer satisfaction. Because of interdisciplinary expertise in infrastructure, development,operational and project management, he acts as a communication integrator with projectmembers.

Patrick Debois’s Specialties:

Skilled in analyzing, implementing and managing complex multi-tier infrastructure projects. Passionate about web related technology and concepts in security,knowledge management and portals. With an keen interest in usability and information architecture or everything that puts the customer experience central.

Patrick Debois’s Experience

• Multimedia Researcher

  VRT

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  2008 — Present (1 year )

  Research on Multimedia Search
  
  * In the past two year the VRT has been feeding a new media archive system with all the new content it is producing. The purpose of this project is to make this data more ‘searchable’. Combining this new data with the old archive data, new ways of exploring are tested. F.i. faceted searches, timeline, coverflow and so on.
  * Aside from the content that is handcoded, new ways of extracting metadata like face detection, audio detection are explored to feed even more information into the system
  * Exploring new User interfaces for faster retrieval of video items
  * Wikipedia as collaborative thesaurus effort instead of VRT thesaurus

• Researcher

  VRT Medialab

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  2008 — Present (1 year )

• Technical Coordinator

  Notary Federation Brussels

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  2007 — 2007 (less than a year)

  * Credoc technically runs the portal and mail environment used by every notary in Belgium. (+/- 8000). As Trust is very important they have high security standards to implement. After an Audit which they successfully past, the next step was to improve the reliability of the solution even more by implementing an Disaster Recovery Solution.
  
  * While Credoc technically passed the Audit, the most urgent was not a technical one but an organizational: Operations successfully ran the environment but too many new projects pushed things into production. Given the understaffing, this resulted in more operational errors and incidents increased and less time was available for the Disaster Recovery Plan.
  
  * Using Scrum both the operational Systems group was alligned with the operational Application group. On a higher level the projects became aware that the operational group was a 'shared' resources and therefore a bottleneck in the organization. Priorities were put in a Program Plan.

• System Architect/Technical Consultant

  Ministerie van Financiën

  (Government Administration industry)

  2005 — 2006 (1 year )

  Identity and Access Management
  * With an internal user population of more then 35.000 users, the organization is determined to automate the identity and access management of their IT environment.
  
  * For this the proper procedures and responsible persons were put in place. Based upon a new organization hierarchy a role based access control (RBAC) was implemented.
  
  * These procedures together with the user store management was controlled by implementing the Sun Identity Manager solution: an integration between LDAP , Active directory, mail, HR system and even a telephony system was achieved by synchronization and applying new company policies. (f.i. password, request approval).
  
  * All access policies were centralized using Sun ONE Access Manager and by installing Policy Agent or by directly using a JAVA API to interface with the session management of the solution. By centralizing, all access is logged to an Oracle RAC Database.

• System Architect/Technical Consultant/Technical Project Manager (Sun)

  swITch

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Internet industry)

  March 2004 — January 2005 (11 months)

  Intranet portal project
  * With the ultimate goal to create a web-based desktop, an intranet portal was developed based upon Sun ONE Portal and Citrix.
  * Via portal technology it became possible to work in the same personalized environment at work and at home, thereby extending the office environment at other locations.
  * Content and Document Management was supported by using Livelink and various Weblogic Applications.
  * The environment was based upon Unix Sun Solaris 15K and HDS storage. It had to comply to the highest SLA demands. To achieve this, a complete test environment was setup with detailed and extensive testing before going to production.
  
  Identity Management
  * To prepare for complete personalization, an identity management system was implemented based upon Sun ONE LDAP, Identity Server, Active Directory and Radius. A full synchronization of Active Directory and LDAP was implemented by IdSync and custom programming. Programming was done using Java and JNDI.

• System Architect/Technical Project Manager (ACA-IT)

  Eurocontrol

  (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; Internet industry)

  June 2004 — October 2004 (5 months)

  Internet Portal Project
  * For maintenance reasons the One Sky Extranet Stakeholders Portal infrastructure was upgraded.
  * While doing the upgrade, a complete high availability design was done for further implementation.
  * The portal identity services were integrated with the customer meta-directory environment of 10.000 stakeholders.
  * All systems (production and test) used were based upon Sun Solaris and primary programming language was Java.

• System Architect/Technical Analyst

  Ministerie Vlaamse Gemeenschap (EDS)

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Internet industry)

  January 2004 — February 2004 (2 months)

  Content management and Logging Analysis
  * As a fundamental part of the Internet portal (www.vlaanderen.be) the content management and the web statistics solutions were re-designed.
  *A business and technical analysis were conducted for the needs for the involved parties.
  *A report of current problems, solutions and design recommendations was delivered based upon Fatwire/Open Market content management and Webtrends logging analysis.

• System Architect/Technical Project Manager

  Ministerie Vlaamse Gemeenschap (SBS)

  (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; Internet industry)

  April 2003 — February 2004 (11 months)

  PKI implementation and LDAP migration
  * A fundamental part of modern E-government is the ability to strongly authenticate all different entities that interact with the government (people, organizations)
  * A solution based upon a PKI infrastructure was designed conform with the Federal Governement guidelines for authentication.
  * The portal environment was extended with HTTP/S capabilities based upon an infrastructure of Netegrity Siteminder, Apache and Ascertia OSCP.
  * Additional security measures were taken with additional network segmentation based upon Checkpoint Firewall and intrusion detection systems.
  * The LDAP infrastructure was upgraded and integrated with the PKI solution. All systems were based upon Unix Sun Solaris.
  * Aside from the infrastructure, the Directory Information Tree (DIT) was redesigned. An analysis was conducted to verify application compatibility with the new DIT.
  *All LDAP related applications and infrastructure were migrated.

• System Architect/Technical Project Manager

  Proxis (Porthus)

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  October 2002 — March 2003 (6 months)

  Internet website (www.proxis.be)
  * Proxis is one of the major e-business bookshops in Belgium. Their website is vital to their selling as it is their only means of communication.
  * The technical Internet platform was based upon Apache, Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database.
  * To reduce the operational cost and achieve better service levels, the infrastructure was migrated to a collocation at Level3.
  * Due to the migration, the office location was separated from the server location. Using a Terminal server based solution they achieved additional reduction of cost for network bandwidth .

• System Architect

  Fedex (Porthus)

  (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; Internet industry)

  September 2002 — March 2003 (7 months)

  * After a proof of concept project for their CRM application, Fedex decided that the time had come for a complete rollout. As CRM is crucial for an enterprise, the application was setup within a fully redundant, disaster recovery environment.
  * As the CRM application was based upon Windows, a complete Citrix Farm was installed over two locations. Oracle was used as the database together with business logic installed upon Bea Weblogic. This server infrastructure was the first part of the rollout.
  * To achieve maximal disaster recovery, the complete backup solution was revised based upon OmniBack, Legato and Veritas. For storage and clustering Veritas backup was installed upon EMC volumes.

• System Architect

  Fedict (SBS)

  (Government Agency; 5001-10,000 employees; Internet industry)

  January 2002 — November 2002 (11 months)

  * The federal government decided to do a request for proposal for their Internet Portal project. Given the experience of Siemens Business Services within large government infrastructure, they proposed to the request.
  * In the solution proposed, all major parts of a corporate web solution were included: web and application servers (IPlanet), Database (Oracle). To feed these application, a document and content management based upon Documentum was proposed.
  * As the base system, Unix Sun Solaris systems were proposed. All redundancy was taken into account using clustering and loadbalancing mechanisms (Nortel).
  * Networking and security was envisioned with Checkpoint Firewall and Cisco material. Internet connectivity was achieved via redundant BGP4 internet routing.
  * The proposal was not selected by Fedict but was said to have the best technical solution of all proposals.

• System Architect/Technical Project Manager

  Ministerie Vlaamse Gemeenschap (SBS)

  (Government Agency; 1001-5000 employees; Internet industry)

  January 2001 — October 2002 (1 year 10 months)

  * Building upon the success of their first Internet Portal, the infrastructure was extended with a complete Content Management System (OpenMarket/Fatwire). This allowed a better workflow to publish information on the internet from within the organization. This CMS system was further integrated with the concept of Document Management system (based upon a shared environment of Documentum) .
  * The search engine system was migrated from Iplanet Compass Server to Autonomy Indexing Services. This mainly because the existing content was too large to categorize manually. Still a taxonomy based application was developed allowing the categorization of content in a demand-centered approach.
  * The existing intranet and internet applications were converted to the new Application server standard (J2EE Iplanet Application Server/Tomcat).
  * Increasingly, data sources from outside the Vlaamse Gemeenschap were integrated using Webservices and Message Queuing (Iplanet Message Queuing).

• Wetenschappelijk medewerker

  Ghent University

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  1995 — 1995 (less than a year)