Managed Service for Silicon Systems

Silicon Systems, UK

Silicon Systems is a Wokingham, U.K.-based company delivering leading-edge, highly supported IT solutions. Flowmation, its primary product, combines Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Project Management tools to help advertising, print and publishing firms easily organize their assets into projects that are accessible to both local and remote project participants. Flowmation was initially developed by staff in-house. However, as Silicon’s user base grew, end-user support and customer requests for more functionality increasingly began to absorb more time and effort. The current team could no longer handle the requests, and at the same time it did not seem possible to expand it quickly and at reasonable cost within the UK.
Silicon started to consider the outsourcing option and finally chose Intetics as a technology partner and its Offshore Dedicated Team (ODT) as a cooperation model for distinct advantages it provides: expert management consulting, complete process setting, project and relationship governance on Intetics’ side and full control over the offshore team given to the Client.

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Solution for Newsroom Management

Xalmiento web-services, Germany

Solution is a new platform for cross-media newsroom management targeted at medium-size and large publishing houses. It helps to plan appointments, manage stories, co-ordinate staff, control beats, and streamline cross-media workflows. Thus, it makes the whole range of publishing processes less time-consuming and therefore a lot more productive. In the developed system stories and appointments can be easily assigned to employees. Every user has his/her own personal site where his/her assignments can be tracked. A simple and easy-to-use “Notes” function enables managers to inform their staff. Specific days and sections can be selected for targeted communication. Personnel – internal or external – can get access to certain sections only, thus being restricted in viewing information that is not directly related to their work. Automated email notifications are sent out to inform users about new entries or changes in existing ones.  Nowadays the service is used by about 8 companies and the number of customers continues to expand.

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Jewish entertainment site

Microdivision, USA

CJewish, the Jewish entertainment site, allows users to buy and download audio and video files, on the one hand, and upload and sell their files, on the other hand. The Download Area provides users with quick search for albums, tracks, and artists and convenient filtering items. It allows hearing or watching previews of audio and video files, buying and downloading the files, saving users’ downloads to allow re-download of the items again, checking user order history. The Upload Area supports two types of sellers: trusted and verified. It allows users to upload and sell audio and video files, create automatic previews of audio and video files, upload users’ own previews of the files, check the selling status of the files. The Administration Area allows managing users, artists, transactions, payments, and uploaded items, making payouts to the users whose files are being sold, approving or banning added items and artists. The application provides secured authentication and authorization, user registration and managing users’ account information, shopping cart functionality, emailing, error logging, etc.

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Shop Automation System Migration

IMPAQ Co., UK

Ladbrokes is one of the biggest companies in the gambling industry in the UK and Ireland. Their shops are equipped with custom software for shop work automation. The shop automation system is a set of applications distributed across the network with different configurations available (for shop server, shop till, head office server, etc).

The system was implemented in VB6 and C++ 6.0, and only supported the Windows 2000 operating system. Such a solution has several disadvantages:

• Windows 2000 is no longer supported by Microsoft, with no updates and patches released;
• Code in VB6 and C++ 6.0 is hard to maintain and extend;
• It’s impossible to use modern programming technologies for a quicker and more convenient development process.

The client decided to migrate the system to the .Net platform. Project objectives:

• Perform re-architecture of the project to improve performance and decrease maintenance costs;
• Support future Windows operating systems like XP and Vista;
• Immediate integration of migrated pieces to the live system.

It was decided to migrate applications and re-engineer and restructure where possible.. Since the client required immediate delivery of migrated pieces of the system to live shops, the system was decomposed into reasonably independent sub-projects which could be migrated on their own and incorporated into the system without affecting other pieces.

Different applications had different processes for logging their activity during operation which significantly complicated maintenance by technical support staff. To improve maintenance a new logging subsystem was suggested. The logging standards were well documented and basic components for standard uniform logging were introduced.

Intetics team supported the client in planning the migration programme through the creation of discrete work units and setting out development standards including build and release procedures to ensure as smooth and pain free an upgrade as possible.

Intetics team has completed 80% of the programme which included re-engineering the subsystem responsible for capturing and then automatically processing mark sense slips. This has been well received by the client and their employees with an increase in reliability and performance.

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Editorial System Localization

Encyclopedia Britannica, USA

Editorial Control System (ECS) is a web-based internal business process application for content and information base management. Intetics localized it, and also performed its internationalization by developing a text extracting tool to separate UI elements (resources) from source code. To increase the speed of finding and extracting “hard-coded” strings from source code, String Extraction Tool was created. After the extraction process, all hard-coded strings are replaced with function calls to the Resource Manager module that returns strings for the current locale.

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