Development of Global Contact Managment & Sales Automation System

The Customer

The customer is a start-up firm based in Germany. The customer wanted to conceptualize and architect a global contact management and sales automation system using XML RPC web-services-based client server protocol. This was the latest area of the technology research and the customer wanted a technology focused organization to prototype and evolve the architecture around it.

The Challenge 

The main challenge for the project was to work with the evolving technologies such as phpGroupWare. At that time, there were a lot of problems in the 0.9.002 version which the PhoenixBird team ended up fixing themselves. In addition, the server did not support some of the features that the customer wanted to use in their product. As a result, the PhoenixBird team enhanced the PhpGroupWare server.

The other important objectives to be met were as follows: 

• Conceptualize and evolve an XML RPC based client server model with the client residing on the Windows box and the server on the Linux box
• Do the ‘build vs. buy’ analysis for the tools to enable the architecture
• Develop a professional GUI on windows box
• Suggest the future development architecture for the product
• Cost Effective Product Development

The Solution

• PhoenixBird used the ‘Dedicated Resource Model’ for this project (i.e. team members worked exclusively on the customer’s project, and that way the customer was able to develop confidence and a stable relationship with the team).
• Developing the Prototype: PhoenixBird developed a prototype to verify the proposed architecture. For the prototype, one ‘get’ and one ‘update’ call was implemented using the ASP.NET client and phpGroupWare server. For implementing the data grid in the user interface, the team looked at two products – MS DataGrid and InterSoft’s WebGrid. The team did a detailed comparison of these two products and finally decided to go with WebGrid as it supported features such as multi-column sort.
• PhoenixBird implemented the XML RPC based web services architecture for the project: .NET based GUI layer and PHP based phpGroupWare server running on Linux box. The MySQL was used as a DB server internally by the phpGroupWare server.

Application Development: PhoenixBird Ltd. became responsible for developing the application. The detailed design and development was done with the project team, which consisted of –a Project Manager, a Technical Lead, a QA Lead and 4 Java developers. While developers were writing the code, the QA Lead prepared the System Test Cases. The System Test Cases were used to verify that all the requirements had been coded properly. 

Deployment Support: The application was developed using the TomCAT application server and the MySQL database server. However the deployment was done on WebSphere and Oracle. During the deployment, the PhoenixBird team worked side by side with the customer’s deployment team. 

Stress Test: Once the acceptance test was done, the customer proceeded to the Stress Test. PhoenixBird Software supported the stress test through its valuable resources.

Business Gains

The customer is gaining a lot with the new web-based presentation system, as it will increase sales of its eProducts and the visibility of higher education in the E-marketplace. The end-users of the site, such as sales representatives and other public users, feel much more comfortable using the new system and can explore many more tours than before because of the new easy-to-use, powerful creation tool that allows the author to create new tours more efficiently.