Visual WebGui Case Studies

"Only several days of development were needed for the creation of the application, compared to some weeks which would have been required with other solutions. Moreover, the code maintenance is very convenient so that additional savings are already obvious," Thilo Ruhland

Overview
smcTeam, System Management Consulting GmbH & Co. KG is a software solution provider with many years of experience in enterprise-wide client and server management and the implementation of custom software solutions to meet customers' needs.

The customer, Stadtwerke Düsseldorf AG is a medium-size energy provider located in Germany. Their local IT department is responsible for the management of some thousand client computers. Software delivery to these client machines has to be automated to a very high degree.

Business needs
smcTeam's AeX Collection Manager is a web-based application used to simplify software distribution within an Altiris environment. Administrators are able to assign computers to collections and start software delivery without having to use the Altiris Console. It is possible to assign an arbitrary number of n systems to m collections. Permissions can be controlled via group membership – for example Helpdesk and Rollout. Using filters computers and collections can be chosen multiple times. Moreover it is possible to import or export computers and collections.

The functionality described above did not exist as out-of-the-box feature so the company needed to develop a new solution to distribute software packages quickly and with a minimal administrative overhead. Based on a standard software distribution application a frontend had to be developed which allowed for a quick on-demand delivery of software packages to particularly chosen client computers.

The customer also required that the solution would be a web application with the functionality and intuitive look and feel of a usual Windows application. A highly comfortable and fault-tolerant web-based frontend to the server-based software distribution application was needed. The design should have supported the functionality in a self-explanatory way.

The handling of the frontend should appear smooth and straight to the administrator with no direct relation to the complexity and amount of computer objects that would have to be managed via the console.

The Solution
Visual WebGui was chosen for that project since it provided the fastest solution. "We used Visual WebGui because it took only a few days of development and the result was convincing," said Thilo Ruhland of the smcTeam and added "Web application development using Visual WebGui gave us the possibility to create solutions faster, without dealing with html, css or aspx stuff. The application is easy to administer because we had to develop far fewer lines of code."

The development process with Visual WebGui is straightforward and very intuitive due to the single development layer and proven methodologies. "Functionality as well as look & feel are exactly as expected. We would strongly encourage using VWG for any development task involving the creation of Web Frontends which are performance based and state of the art from a design perspective," said Thilo Ruhland.

Benefits
Using Visual WebGui for the AeX Collection Manager contributed for a very short time-to-market – faster than any other alternative in the market while providing the web-based application with the following advantages:

• The usage of the administration console developed using Visual WebGui makes software distribution simple and convenient.

• On several administrator workstations the installation of Altiris Administration Console is not needed any longer (no ActiveX component to be installed!)

• For these administrators no permissions within Altiris Security Role Management are needed further on.

• The speed of software distribution process could have been highly increased based on the new frontend including Visual WebGui.

• Visual WebGui also enhanced the Client Management functionality of the original product.

• The development of a web application using Visual WebGui only needed a few days compared to a standard aspx application.

"Only several days of development were needed for the creation of the application, compared to some weeks which would have been required with other solutions. Moreover, the code maintenance is very convenient so that additional savings are already obvious," Thilo Ruhland.

Screen shots