Visual WebGui Case Studies

"Working with Visual WebGui is similar to developing client server applications… saves a lot of development effort… and you have to take care only of the business and data logic affecting the GUI," Offer Kamrat

Overview
CommuniTech focuses its technology and solutions on business technology applications which focus on developing growth engines for organizations, where IT is the core for these engines. Thus the technological solutions aimed at enabling these changes must be rapidly developed and quickly adopted by users.

Brosh is a social activity management system that supports the procedures and working patterns of organizations that operate in communities. Mainly, these organizations operate as non-profit organizations, such as youth movements, community centers, civil social departments etc. The target of the system is to organize the working procedure of all hierarchical aspects of a these organizations, to allow students and participants to interact with the activities of the organization and to enable online planning, control and reporting of activities.
See also Brosh on YouTube.

Business needs
Non-profit organizations usually operate under a small IT budget that makes it difficult for them to purchase or develop an IT product, and to pay annual licenses for software. These organizations can benefit from an IT product that is delivered as a service, so they can pay a fair monthly fee, as part of their operational expenses.
     
Therefore, it was needed to create a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution that would allow users from the organization to share with each other the same application and the same data model. Since many non-profit organizations operate in similar manners, and manage similar data it was decided to create a solution that could serve different organizations with minor changes.

The system should be able to support 200 concurrent users and offer an intuitive UI which would be based on familiar MS Outlook design. The system should base on the organizational structure so it would allow the following features in accordance with it in terms of data management and hierarchy. This would allow each level a full access and control of the level defined below it.

Students and parents

• Student Portal
• Receive information on activities
• Activity registration
• Payments
• Purchasing products
• Update personal details

Group leaders

• Student & parent record management
• Create new students
• Receive payments
• Create activities according to budget
• Send Email & text messages
• Activity summary
• Send reports to supervisors
• Documents management
• Calendar management

Supervisors

• Student and group leaders management
• Manage the records of group leaders
• Grant restricted discounts
• Approve activities
• Send reports to supervisors

Regional Managers

• Create and approve budget
• Manage the records of coordinators
• Grant discounts
• Send reports to supervisors

Treasurer

• Budget and income tracking
• Financial reporting
• Exporting transactions to external accounting systems
• Procurement and suppliers management

General Manager

• Entire organization view
• Generate budgetary reports
• Generate planned vs. actual reports

The Solution
CommuniTech decided to create Brosh with Visual WebGui after learning about the platform a few years ago when searching for a new control to display schedule. "I was looking for a scheduled box control and datagrid view that acted as WinForms. I found Visual WebGui and started to look into their examples which proved to work amazingly on the client side," said Ofer Kamrat, CTO.

Back then CommuniTech had a wizard that could connect to any data source (oracle, SQL SERVER, web services etc’) and generate ORM/EDM and Application logic, but there was still a need to rewrite the GUI using client requests. As CommuniTech usually works with enterprises with data driven systems, they found that in most cases they were working with 4 different GUI patterns such as lists, manage screens, data grids etc. and that they could generate the GUI side as well. "I found that with Visual WebGui I can fairly easily create an application environment and generates those objects to support many features that would later become an application infrastructures (such as Paging, sorting,  Security, Customizations, filters, data amendments, save, permissions, dirty flags, printing, etc’)," stated Kamrat.

"When I started to work with Visual WebGui I found out that a Web developer does not have to work on lower level HTML and JavaScript which saves a huge amount of work," Kamrat said and added that "Working with Visual WebGui is similar to developing client server applications. This itself saves a lot of development effort. The rendering to the HTML is done by Visual WebGui and you have to take care only of the business and data logic affecting the GUI."
 
The system provides complete data separation and separation of organization specific terminology and graphical objects. E.g. the term “region” in organization A can appear as ”area” in organization B. The term “group leader” in one organization can be “guide” in another one. The logo of organization A will appear only for users who are defined in the system as part of it, and will not appear in screens and reports when users of a different organization connect to the system. Obviously, users of one organization will always see data of their organization, and will never see data of other organizations.

Benefits
Due to Visual WebGui CommuniTech was able to deliver the Brosh system as a SaaS solution to different organizations with an intuitive, responsive UI for up to 200 concurrent users while incorporating the full original list of functionalities. The Visual WebGui environment allowed the CommuniTech team to significantly cut development efforts in achieving so. In addition, the application was designed to be easily deployed on the Cloud, and WebGui promises a transparent migration from Web to Cloud, as desired.

Visual WebGui allowed CommuniTech to manage organization specific separation in the UI level by creating a CSS file for each organization specific screen. Since the application determines in run time the correct files to be loaded it is also possible to run multilingual screens simultaneously, right-to-left and left-to-right, and configure the upon login which language to use (see screen shots for an example).

Screenshots

Hebrew

Arabic