Web-Based Software for Child Care Organization Management

About Our Client

The Client is a child care management organization. It has a head office with upper-level management and a number of childcare centers with their responsible persons – local management.

Challenge

Organization Navigator is a web-based software for management of locations, relative document flow, locations maintenance workflow, budget and actions planning.

The project was designed to provide all management levels with a proper tool that would allow accumulating in one system the information about the document workflow relative to buildings and costs of their maintenance. The system supports statistics gathering and financial reporting features.

Project goals:

• Enhance the existing MS Access application by providing rich user interface.
• Improve the existing functionality.
• Make the application web-enabled (available over the Internet and intranet).
• Make the application customizable for multiple users.

Solution

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was selected as a major technology for the realization of the project. WPF features allow building a rich user interface, which exploits the full power a user’s computing resources and is easily available over the Internet and intranet through native XBAP format support: user gets an impression that he or she is using a desktop application through a browser – user interface is as rich as its desktop counterparts are.

XBAP applications are hosted in a sandbox, which ensures that the client's computer is protected against misuse and allows applying necessary restrictions to secure client-server interactions.

ScienceSoft’s team has developed several ways to enable secure client-server interactions, which are implemented in new WPF/XBAP projects.

The system's functionality is realized by Web service hosted on solution provider's server, which considerably simplifies its maintenance. Since XBAP applications are only allowed to interact with web services hosted on the client-part server, the direct access to provider's web services is denied. Client-side part interacts both with customer-side and provider-side web services. DM-V-VM architecture was chosen and implemented as it represents the perfect fit for WPF technology.

Results

ScienceSoft’s team is currently working on this project on a Time and Material (T&M) basis. The solution is already implemented in beta version and was presented at software exhibitions. The full-scale software version is about to be released.

Services provided to the Client: web application design, custom web application development, and outsourcing.

Technologies and Tools

Management:

Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Project 2003/2007, Sparx Enterprise Architect 7.0, iterative development, risk management, change requests management, team motivation.

Project:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, WPF, XBAP, C#, LINQ (Linq2SQL), ASP.NET Web Services, Microsoft

Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft SQL server 2008 and Microsoft Reporting Services, Crystal Reports, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, 3rd party controls (Xceed WPF DataGrid v3.1, DevComponents WPF Scheduler), Cruise Control, NAnt, NUnit, Microsoft Internet Information Services.