Visual WebGui Case Studies

“Visual WebGui provides the best starting point by far when migrating from a .NET based technology… it also provides a huge advantage by allowing to keep the maintenance and any future development within Visual Studio and the same .NET skills and programming knowhow.” Leon Langlayben, Chief Architect at Guardian.

Overview
Bezeq is Israel’s largest and leading telecom company. The company puts the customers, their needs and priorities at the center of its operations and in order to provide better services and support to their customers equipped their field technicians with mobile devices. Using the mobile application on the customers’ premises technicians could offer better and more professional service whether it is technical support, installations or sales for the private or the business sector.

Business needs
Bezeq had a Windows Mobile application for its Private and Business Divisions field technicians who used the application for on premises installations, technical support and sales. The application was developed with .NET Compact Framework for Windows CE phones through Microsoft Mobile Information Server.

With the fast progress in mobile hardware and software, the age of the application started to reflect on both the technological and the business sides. The supported devices became old and along with the performance issues of the application the work efficiency of the technicians were affected. In addition, there were some increasing challenges in deploying and installing the application on each individual Windows CE device and the development and maintenance became expensive and complicated.

As a result, it was decided to migrate the application into a modern technology that would allow easier maintenance, deployment and version updates. Moreover, there was a need to allow technicians to work with up to date devices and gradually exchange those to tablets which proved to be more suitable for the purpose of the application. The new solution should support both Android Tablets and iPad and still provide impeccable security and performance levels for this internal data centric application.

The Solution
Bezeq turned to Guardian, a Malam Team subsidiary in order to convert the application to an up to date technology that answers all of their needs. From their vast experience and knowledge of the market, Guardian decided that Visual WebGui would be the most suitable solution for this project. Visual WebGui provides a quick and riskless migration solution from the .NET Compact Framework to ASP.NET browser based accessibility via different devices and platforms such as Android and iOS devices.

“Visual WebGui provides the best starting point by far when migrating from a .NET based technology” said Leon Langlayben, Chief Architect at Guardian and added that “it also provides a huge advantage by allowing to keep the maintenance and any future development within Visual Studio using the same .NET skills and knowhow.”

Guardian completed the project in less than 2 months with 4 developers which included the migration to a browser based mobile application, improvements to the user experience and some modifications of the UI for mobile. The team is about to finish its work on an off-line feature that would ensure technicians’ access to the application even when there is no internet or network connectivity at all.

Benefits
The migration from a locally installed Windows CE application into the browser based Visual WebGui provided many advantages to Bezeq. Due to Visual WebGui, Bezeq can now equip their technicians with up to date devices and has the freedom to choose between the different operating systems and devices in the market. A browser based application means centralized deployment which translates into much simpler deployment and version updates for about 1,000 technicians who use the application with their mobile and tablet devices.

The new application provides users with better user experience as its UI was adapted to mobile usage and the performance was improved. “The new application is a life changer. We get a great feedback from the field technicians who love the improved navigation and obviously the modern devices they can use now” said Ohad Givol, Head of Software Development Department at Bezeq.

Visual WebGui has a unique pipeline that optimizes the traffic between the client and the server so it actually uses only 10% of the bandwidth which is a great advantage for rich applications such as this. In addition, it never transfers applicative logic or data to the client it is totally secured.