Visual WebGui Showcases

"Creating such a feature-rich internet application in this very short time would have been impossible without Visual WebGui."

Overview
TIP management AG is the leading company in Europe specialized in Business Intelligence (BI) in the medical sector. With headquarters in Düsseldorf, Zürich and Graz, the TIP management AG researches, produces and implements solutions for Health Care Management in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

TIP management AG is Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and developed an application that is used as the Web Front-End for the Data Warehouse applications of customers in Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

HCe® - Health Care Explorer offers reporting, analysis and planning capabilities custom-tailored to the needs of companies in the medical sector. The core of HCe® is a sophisticated Data Warehouse (DWH) offering extreme flexibility due to free parameterization and interfaces to all common Medical Information Systems.

Business needs
The former HCe® solution included three types of user interfaces:

• A Microsoft Excel based reporting and analysis tool (Desktop)
• A Microsoft Reporting Services based reporting tool (Web)
• A configuration and planning tool (Desktop)

There was a large need to replace the desktop based configuration and planning tool with a web based solution that would allow accessing it via a standard web browser. As a result, the company decided to move to only two user interfaces that practically would not need any client installation (assuming that the target audience already works with Microsoft Excel):

• Microsoft Excel for reporting and analysis (Desktop)
• The HCe® Web front-end for reporting (including Microsoft Reporting Services), configuration and planning (Web)

The redesigned HCe® Web front-end needed to be faster, provide a more user friendly UI and easier to manage than the previous desktop application. In addition, it was important that the web based HCe® mimics the user interface of the former desktop application while presenting the functions in a modern way. It should also offer the highest possible performance and responsiveness available for web technologies to its customers and users.

The Web UI was also required to be able to run in a standard browser without the need to install additional Plug-ins. There was also no desire to base the solution upon new, unproven technologies, so it had to use state of the art Microsoft based technologies (.net, ASP.net, AJAX). The chosen technology also needed to be suitable for data centric applications and capable of handling large amounts of data without affecting performance. 

Altogether, the HCe® Web front-end for reporting, configuration and planning solution had to be easy to maintain and the overall development process had to be as easy and fast as possible.

The Solution
TIP management AG development team had to find a technology that fulfilled this list of business requirements mentioned above. Evaluating ASP.net based development with third party components turned out to be pretty hard to maintain and error-prone. So the team looked for an alternative solution until it eventually discovered Visual WebGui which perfectly fitted their needs.

"Visual WebGui reduces the complexity of web development to a minimum. The fact that the developer no longer needs to think like a web developer saves a huge amount of time and allowed the application to be market ready in a very short time." Joerg Stieg

The fact that Visual WebGui applications are developed much like desktop applications simplified the development process of this rich web based solution and allowed the developers to focus on the business logic.  Even many steps in development that are not trivial for web applications (for example implementing tabs or other complex user interfaces) were proven to be extremely easy to accomplish and saved the team a lot of time in comparison to an ASP.net web development approach.

In addition, Visual WebGui offers a large set of controls and features that allow to create advanced UI functionality right out-of-the-box and then to easily deploy that web application via a Windows Installer with nearly no configuration required.

Benefits
Using Visual WebGui provided TIP management AG with the shortest possible time to market for the HCe® Web front-end for reporting, configuration and planning solution due to the development simplicity that the Visual WebGui platform presents and its included toolset. Visual WebGui's generous out-of-the-box feature set allowed the team to achieve the desired functionality with no need for implementing 3rd party and as a result to save additional time and budget.

"Creating such a feature-rich application in this very short time would have been impossible without Visual WebGui." Joerg Stieg

Furthermore, based on Visual WebGui the new solution presents state of the art web technology that is still using proven Microsoft technologies and very easy to maintain. It also provides desktop-like performance in terms of UI responsiveness and lifting abilities while all is accessible via a standard web browser with no installation needed on the client.

Screen shots
Main screen of HCe® displaying user-configurable widgets and an Outlook-like navigation.