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IFN Solutions: Porting the hours reporting system to web

Background

IFN Solutions specializing in Document, Content and Business Process Management solutions. Since its inception in 1993, IFN Solutions has been recognized as a leading Enterprise Content Management solutions provider, delivering value added ECM systems to its customers. The company has developed and implemented a wide range of comprehensive solutions for Business Process Management and Content Management. IFN maintains a long term partnership with FILENET Corp., a software provider, ranked as the Enterprise Content Management world leader, and leverages its solutions from FILENET technologies.

Technology wise IFN started developing client/server, ECM and BPM solutions, on Visual Basic 4, growing with the technology shifts to Visual Basic 6 and as the web hype started to emerge IFN created a web version of its client/server BPM/ECM infrastructure. On the web version IFN tried to archive the same functionality and empowering it achieved in the client/server version.

The Need

In the past 9 years IFN solutions has been using an internally developed VB 6.0 + SQL Server based application to manage the working hours of its employees. This system is a mission critical system to IFN since it concludes the bottom lines for both charging the customers for professional services and internal auditing of the company resources divided to customers, projects and tasks.

One very crucial disadvantage of the system was that it is desktop based so that external employees (which constitute a significant portion of the company’s employees) could not report their hours until they either physically attended the company’s offices or used excel spreadsheets emailed/faxes to the company's secretary, causing sometimes reporting errors.

Over the years the company attempted to create a web based application using standard web tools (ASP 3.0 application) which provided reporting capabilities over the web. One trial even concluded in a web application that should have done the job..This multilayered standard web application had suffered from some usability and performance issues and was hard to maintain due to its complex structure which involved some xslt transformations and non-trivial JavaScript code. Furthermore, the application has not been in the critical path of the company's R&D team during a time of engineering the company’s new generation of products, people who developed it left, and the technology focus of the R&D team moved to Microsoft .NET.

Some of the challenges and complexities implementing such a web solution faced

• Fluency and Performance – any selected web architecture either performed an entire posting of the forms or performed bad relatively (when AJAX like solutions where picked).
  
• Date & Time picker – enable an intuitive and standard way to pick date and time
  
• Data Listing – showing a filtered list of hours reporting of a day.
  
• Data Entry – implementing a whole bunch of data bounded controls ordered by the desired layout.
  
• Application logic – in any of the previous solutions, there was no uniformity in where the logic is located (client or server).

The Solution

After IFN began to use Visual WebGui as a platform to create its next generation ECM and BPM solutions, it was only natural to use VWG in order to port hours reporting capabilities to the web.

In an accumulated month of one non-web qualified developer and some guidance from the CTO as the "expert" of the desktop system, IFN has built a thorough solution enabling hours reporting through the web maintaining the original desktop application’s hours reporting functionality including a capability of producing excel summaries using VWG.

Given Visual WebGui’s server centralized architecture, it was only natural to reuse the legacy COM business logics on the server instead of having to rewrite the code and hold more than one code base.

Solutions provided by VWG to the challenges and complexities mentioned above

• Fluency and Performance – the highly optimized client/server communication and the smart rendering of VWG DHTML presentation layer has provided high performance, a stable and sustainable system.
  
• Date & Time picker – WinForms (desktop) similar date and time picking controls are provided as an out-of-the-box within VWG.
  
• Data Listing – VWG is data-intensive ready and provides an enhanced data bounded ListView and a fully editable data bounded DataGridView controls.
  
• Data Entry – VWG enables the entire set of data entry controls and a WinForms mimicked set of layout tools (i.e. anchoring, docking, panel, group-box, tab-controls etc.)
  
• Application logic – VWG’s On Server Web concept simplifies the code to a single layered architecture enables managing the entire application from the server layer alone.

The Results

The new solution works fast and stable, hours reporting are now on-time enabling tighter managerial supervision and a more accurate invoice producing to customers. Remote hours reporting case in IFN is closed.

• Performance and fluency are the best IFN can ask from a pure web deployment
  
• Users can now use the application in a most intuitive desktop-like manner
  
• Working with forms behave just like an application user would expect them to
  
• Controls are standard WinForms look & feel like
  
• Application logic is implemented entirely on the server.
  

The application can be maintained easily by any beginner lever developer – no web background is required. Furthermore, since the new web based hours reporting became a more accessible SSO authenticated system, it is now used not only for external usage but for internal organization usage as it spares the need for local installations.

Screenshots

Hours report status of a specific day

Adding new report item