A bulk messaging SaaS application launched with a rich responsive UI
January 19, 2011 :: Categories:
Development,
SaaS :: 3837 Views :: Download as PDF:
“After evaluation of the available toolsets on the market to build dynamic websites, we chose the ASP.Net based Visual WebGui. Visual WebGui combined with SQL Server 2008 and SQL Reporting Services proved to be very good choices that exceeded the original expectations at ease of development, scalability, performance and security. Using this combination of tools allowed Jabber Enterprises to meet all of their requirements on schedule.” Mike Penn, Owner of SaaS Web Apps and Jabber Enterprises, LLP
Overview
After 2+ years of running a successful family owned bulk text messaging business, JabberText.com , the management took their customer’s requested ‘Wish List’ items and their competitive analysis and decided to launch a new bulk messaging business, JabberBlast.com that would provide customers a more robust and feature-rich alternative. With the expanded capabilities the company is now able to offer “VoiceBlasts”, “TextBlasts” and custom Voice and Text campaigns.
Business needs
Jabber Enterprises, LLP needed to continue to provide the best, most affordable and technically advanced services to their customers. In order to do this a choice needed to be made whether or not to upgrade the existing JabberText.com site or build a separate site that could offer more advanced features and message delivery methods to augment the basic texting services that JabberText.com has to offer. The company also needed the ability to easily add new features and expand both service offerings as well as scale operations easily to keep up with the increased demand. "Given the target release date of January 2011, we knew it had to be a development platform that would allow us to build and deploy the site quickly while providing a high level of application security and data integrity," said Mike Penn, Owner of SaaS Web Apps and Jabber Enterprises, LLP.
Since the users would be accessing the system from many locations on various operating systems throughout the country it needed to be accessible from any location over the internet and able to run on the mainstream computing platforms.
Performance was a main key and the application needed to be able to perform well both client side and server side without the client side lag that is typical of many AJAX based web solutions. With the messaging, reporting and analytical capabilities that were required, much of the processing needed to be done server side on dedicated servers but the app still needed to maintain the richness and responsiveness of a desktop application.
The Solution
"After evaluation of the available toolsets on the market to build dynamic websites, we chose the ASP.Net based Visual WebGui. Visual WebGui combined with SQL Server 2008 and SQL Reporting Services proved to be very good choices that exceeded the original expectations at ease of development, scalability, performance and security. Using this combination of tools allowed Jabber Enterprises to meet all of their requirements on schedule," said Owver Mike Penn.
"The Visual WebGui designer allowed us to easily and quickly put together working prototypes in less than half the time it would have taken using the various JavaScript libraries and archaic web design tools. With Visual WebGui we are able to take a ‘Prototype Driven’ design and development approach which has proven to be much more effective for both JabberBlast.com and for our clients of SaaSWebApps.com," Mike Penn.
“Finding the right development platform with the ease of deployment, scalability and availability that you get with a web app as well as the performance, security and rich user interface of a desktop app that would be able to handle thousands of transactions and many users became a ‘no-brainer’ when we discovered Visual WebGui,” added Penn.
Benefits
"With Visual WebGui we were able to quickly build an application with a rich and robust custom user interface that performed like a desktop application," said Mike Penn and added "With Visual WebGui’s Web UI Design tool we were able to easily customize the look and feel of the web app adding our own flair to the already rich out-of-the-box GUI controls"
In addition, due to the Visual WebGui platform the performance of the new application has been nothing short of excellent and by far better than typical AJAX based web solutions.
Screenshots
Login Screen - Role based membership and security
TextBlast – SMS text messages can be scheduled or sent immediately to groups and/or individuals. Advanced multithreaded phone number pooling allows messages to be sent at speeds necessary for even the largest message blasts.
VoiceBlast – Voice messages can be scheduled or sent immediately to groups or individuals. You can either record a message to be sent or use the advanced text-to-speech capabilities and type in the message to be read to your recipients.
Manage Groups and Contacts – Manage groups and contacts with advanced editing features such as right-click menus and drag-and-drop.
Contact Import Wizard – Easily import your groups and contacts using the import wizard with advanced drag-n-drop and field mapping capabilities.
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Payment Screens – Tightly integrated payment flows with PayPal’s Website Payments Pro. There are two payment flows, Direct Payment in which you do not leave the customer portal, and Express Payment in which one step takes you to PayPal for account verification and returns you for checkout.
