Briefing Automation Software that Improved Business Efficiency and Flexibility
Customer
The Customer is a US business intelligence company helping executives and managers make data-driven decisions under time pressure. The Customer’s specialists capture information about industries and companies from trustworthy media resources. Afterwards, they present this information to their customers in the form of daily or weekly briefings sent by email.
Challenge
The Customer’s briefings preparation process was completely manual, which was rather time-consuming. The Customer wanted to parse HTML pages with a dedicated Chrome extension and automatically create briefings based on the information found. A back end web administrator panel was required to organize the user and recipient management. Besides, the Customer requested to organize effective briefings distribution and viral information acquisition. They also needed a cloud database to manage and store the growing array of briefings.
Solution
The scope of the project comprised the following interrelated modules:
Chrome extension
ScienceSoft delivered a Chrome extension to automate briefings creation process. The extension enables to parse the information from the relevant HTML pages, such as news posts. Then, it automatically captures the metatags contained in these pages and displays them in a briefing window. The window contains the information about the post title, URL, author, publication date, media contribution, and some other important details. Our team also added several options to the context menu. By clicking them, the users can capture the summary and comments previously highlighted by them in an HTML page. After that, the summary and comments also appear to be displayed in the briefing window. This way, the briefings contain the basic information about the analyzed pages including their summary and comments. We also enabled parsing Twitter account names and handlers that are then displayed in the media contribution section if a news post comes from Twitter.
Briefing editor
ScienceSoft’s team developed a multifunctional web application for editing briefings. The application enables to combine articles with a selected tag name, reorder them, preview, save and send. Besides, our specialists made several fields in the editor manually editable, such as Summary and Tags. The briefing specialists got an opportunity to correct or expand Summary and change Tags.
ScienceSoft optimized the user interface for the latest version of Chrome browser and deployed the solution to Amazon cloud. Our team’s effort also included ensuring the editor’s compatibility with the most popular browsers and mobile devices.
Back end
ScienceSoft created a web administrator panel that enabled an effective user and recipient management. This way only authorized administrators are allowed to work with the Briefing editor application and assign privileges to all new users and recipient groups. Our specialists also optimized back end data storage. They carried out BuzzSumo and SendGrid integration to facilitate acquiring viral information and delivering briefings through the cloud-based platform respectively.
Results
The Customer got a Chrome extension to parse HTML pages and create briefings automatically and a web application for their editing. The web administrator panel was developed for the user and recipient management. This way, the Customer improved their business processes, increased their efficiency and got greater flexibility to parse and process the information from HTML pages relevant to their customers.
Technologies and Tools
Chrome extension: JavaScript, GULP, NPM
Briefing editor: JQuery UI, TinyMCE, JavaScript, PHP, Symfony PHP framework
