Visual WebGui Showcases

"Our customers were astounded how fast we could present them with the first prototype of their application… We considered using ASP.NET Ajax but in the end decided that the ease of UI development was a major reason for choosing Visual WebGui," Peter Rietmann.

Overview
Chakraborty Software is a group of IT consultants specializing in security and Microsoft development technologies. Chakraborty Software provides custom line of business applications for a wide variety of customers in branches ranging from Health Care, Banking, Industry and Telco. Chakraborty Software is based in Bern Switzerland and has offices in Zurich, Paris and Toronto.

Skillplan is an application that allows management and searching of employee skills which was developed for one of  Switzerland's leading telecoms provider who have a presence throughout Switzerland and offers a full range of products and services for mobile, landline and IP-based voice and data communication.

Business needs
Our customers’ support staff required an application to manage the skill sets of employees to ensure that the right employee was chosen to support and service any of their many customers. Previously their skill management details were collected in Excel sheets and required a lot of tedious maintenance as the number of supported employees grew. There were around 500 employees in the database at the time and the objective was to allow managers to simplify the process of managing employee's skills and selecting the right employee for the right job.

The application should support data intensive operations and still allow a quick and responsive interface for employees to enter their own personal skill assessment and for managers to view that information. The application should be web based so that users can access it via a standard web browser It was also necessary to consider integration with the company's active directory and important that the project meets the completion objectives that entailed a short time to market demands by the customer.

Other functionality requirements included management capabilities in different levels so that managers should be able to enter their employee assessment, manage their employees into teams and manage the hierarchy of skills. And above all administrators should be able to fully customize skills, teams, profiles, employees, roles and role assignment. All of which should eventually allow dispatch agents to be able to perform searches against a skill filter and list the best employees for the selected skill set.

The Solution
Chakraborty Software chose Visual WebGui as the development tool for the user interface (UI) of this solution due to its superior productivity over the alternatives. "We considered using ASP.NET and Ajax but in the end decided that the ease of UI development was a major reason for choosing Visual WebGui," said Peter Rietmann. The developers at Chakraborty Software found Visual WebGui to be extremely intuitive and were able to start using the tool in a very short time. In addition to that most of the team had a lot of WinForms programming experience so there was a very short learning curve before they could see working web applications.

Chakraborty Software also believed that Visual WebGui was the right solution for the data intensive Skillplan application. "Having WinForms type applications for users over a web browser was a major reason for our customer to decide on Visual WebGui," said Peter Rietmann and added that "they were astounded how fast we could present them with the first prototype of their application."

Benefits
Visual WebGui allowed Chakraborty Software delivering the solution with all the original requirements & functionality set by them and the customer ahead of the original deadline. The unique Visual WebGui technology contributed to the fact that the application can be consumed via a standard web browser and do not require specific installations on the end-users' computers. Moreover, the Skillplan application turned to be at least as quick & responsive as expected by the users despite the growing size of the data it carries.
 
Based on familiar WinForms development patterns, Visual WebGui allowed the developers at Chakraborty Software to rapidly prototype the initial application to prove the concept. The fact that there was no need to learn any new significant skills or concepts meant that the team could start the development process almost right away without wasting valuable time.

Overall, the productivity of Visual WebGui shortened the development process and allowed for a 25% savings in the budget for this project. "Development time was dramatically reduced by using Visual WebGui. We found the development with the Visual WebGui framework to be considerably more efficient than other tools," Peter Rietmann.

Screenshots

 
User Management masks was connected to the corporate Active Directory.

 
Employees enter their skill ratings directly into the datagrid.

 
Managers have an overview of their employees and can manage skill ratings on a team or organization basis.

 
Managers can plan how they want to assign their skill budget over a 2 year forecast.

 
Using Roles areas of the application can be easily restricted.