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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