"Thanks to Visual WebGui the product is a simple, easy to use and efficient application that performs exceptionally well over the web while accessible on multiple platforms and browsers"
Overview
CRMCompany is a high quality supplier and consultant in the field of CRM and Information. The company’s objective is to apply its knowledge and experience in order to provide added value to business which would assist them in improving profitability. This is done by providing businesses with the ability to use information technology in commercial and administrative processes efficiently and effectively as possible with a measurable return.
The customer is a big supplier of materials in the construction industry with many nationwide locations. To support logistics, there was a need for a centralized application to simplify the information flow from the various locations to the central administration. This application extends CRMCompany's “open” CRM system to the web and makes the process of maintaining customer information much easier and efficient.
Business needs
The customer is a so called umbrella organization with many independent companies. This organization has a CRM solution in which customer data is maintained from a centralized database. Since the CRM solution is a Windows application and the users which are employees of the independent companies have to maintain their customer data, there was a need for multi-site customers to keep data that would be on this central database. To provide a ‘public’ portal to the customer data, a web portal is needed so each independent company can maintain their own data.
Since every company has its own customer data, the product must consist the capability to upload the data in a specific format and users also need to be able to download their own customer data from the central database to their desktop. It was decided to use Microsoft Excel. Another user requirement was the ability to identify customers for a particular mailing.
The portability and usability was very important for this project. The requirements were based on a target of audience of about 50 different independent companies and totally about 200-300 users and it was important that the solution would allow all those requirements while still flexible and not too complicated to implement.
The Solution
Visual WebGui was chosen because it fulfills all the major requirements. Many web development tools where looked at, but none of the tools had the flexibility, development simplicity and the ease of maintenance that Visual WebGui offers. The Visual WebGui platform also offers a smooth transition with no learning curve for Windows application developers since it uses the same methodologies.
"We were searching for a tool that makes a good compromise between the time it takes to develop a complete application and to make changes afterwards (maintainability). Visual WebGui is the best choice we made because it takes little time to learn how to write a web application, as a developer you don’t have to worry about writing Html, JavaScript or AJAX," said Roy van Duist.
The entire development lifecycle of this web application project (the process of developing, deploying and maintenance) was extremely effective and easy due to Visual WebGui. Other tools are often time-consuming while Visual WebGui takes much shorter development cycles. This is even more significant especially when working on a project with over 200 users, the risk of changes is very large, so maintenance is a very important issue.
Visual WebGui is an easy to use development environment. As a developer you can aim on functionality instead of solving the multi browser problems, etc. One of the best benefits is the built-in AJAX which means that "with VWG it is really easy to write good performing code. There is no time wasted with complex client side code - Just straight to the point code," stated Roy van Duist.
Benefits
Where other development tools are very time consuming, Visual WebGui saves a significant amount of development time. As a developer there is a lot you don’t have to worry about, such as writing code in HTML, Ajax or JavaScript. Everything is handled by the Visual WebGui framework.
But this is not the only benefit, since a lot of time is saved also on creating a cross-browser support when developing a web application with Visual WebGui. The Visual WebGui platform creates by default cross-browser applications that are supported by the most common web browsers.
Visual WebGui makes it also possible to create a rich user interface for both the web and desktop environments. It just takes a little time to convert a WinForm application into a web application which allows to create several environments without spending much time or effort.
The customer appreciates the fact that the web interface provided by the VWG controls has the looks and feel of a desktop application unlike other web development tools that would enable applications that gives a website like experience.
"Thanks to Visual WebGui the product is a simple, easy to use and efficient application that performs exceptionally well over the web while accessible on multiple platforms and browsers," Roy van Duist.
Screen shots
A simple list view. Selecting an item from the list on the left results in a different set of data in the grid.
A customer detail form. Double clicking in the grid result in this detail form of the selected customer.
Exporting the current list results in an Microsoft Excel sheet in which the user can also add changes. The upload of this changed file also updates the data on the server.
