Customer Background

Established in 1920, our customer is a Global Children's Media Company, and is also the largest publisher and distributor of children's books and a leading provider of age-appropriate learning resources in every medium - books, magazines, TV, film, toys and interactive media. They are leaders in educational technology, services and children's media with a global reach of customers in 45 languages over 150 countries.

Challenges and Requirements

Our client operates in countries around the world with original publishing of trade books and educational materials as well as Book Clubs & Book Fairs. They needed an application to be built which would allow users to manage pre/post activities for Book Fairs.

Some of the challenges for the customer was,

• Migrating to open source technologies from licensed tools like WAS to JBoss
• Multiple logins were required for the customer to access different aspects
• Lack of Role Based Authentication for adding assets to application
• Lack of issue/bug tracking mechanisms for quick solutions in production
• Lack of standards deployment process
• Heavy man hours due to absence of proper testing know-how and technology

Some of the new enhancements required for the application were,

• Outlook integration for customers to manage their events
• Geo-location capabilities for customers to check distance, location and directions for a Book Fair
• Implementation of separate server for Real-Time Message processing load
• Integration with SMS and Email for event reminders

Technology

The technologies used by our team in this implementation were,

• Hibernate 2.1.8
• Struts 1.1
• JBoss APP Server 7
• Jquery with Backbone Template Framework
• Geocode API
• SMS gateway API
• Web service
• Quartz
• Velocity Template framework
• EJB 2.1
• AJAX

Our Solution

Through our Application Lifecycle Management expertise and experience our team was able to expertly help the customer achieve their goals and increase both customer experience and application performance.

• Successful migration to JBoss App Server from IBM WAS 5.1
• Implementation of Single Sign-On for their application
• Integration of calendars along with JQuery Backbone Templates
• Implementation of GeoCode API for Book Fair Location functionality
• Role-Based Authentication policies for access and permissions
• Implementation of change of log-level on the fly through User Interface
• Setup Real Time Message Processing capabilities on separate App Server
• Implementation of Selenium for Automated Testing
• Implementations of Jenkins Framework for standard deployment procedure
• Integration of SMS Gateway API and Quartz for Scheduling Email/SMS reminders
• Integration of Online Chat API

Benefits and Results

Through the Application Development and Performance Tuning exercise the customer was able to achieve numerous benefits, out of which some were,

• Reduction of man-hours through automated testing framework
• Integration of SMS Gateway for automated reminders to customers
• UI-based application build and deployment
• Usage of Log Levels for issue tracking
• Online customer care for customers through Chat