Development of a Personnel Planning Application

Customer

Child care organization in the Netherlands.

Challenge

The Nanny - Personnel Planning system is an information system for child care organizations. It provides a set of features to control employee's time and working schedule. The goals of the project was to enhance the existing MS Access Application by providing a rich user interface, to improve existing functionality, and to make the application web-enabled (available over the Internet and intranet).

Solution

ScienceSoft team selected Windows Presentation Foundation to realize the solution. This choice provided the foundation for building a rich user interface, which exploited the full power of a client computer and was easily available over the Internet and intranet through a native XBAP support.

XBAP applications were hosted in a sandbox. This ensured that the client's computer was protected against misuse and allowed applying necessary restrictions to secure client-server interactions. ScienceSoft team developed several ways to enable secure client-server interactions, which were applied to new WPF/XBAP projects.

The system's functionality was realized on a web service hosted on a provider’s server. This considerably simplified its maintenance. Since XBAP applications were only allowed to interact with web services hosted on the client-part servicer, direct access to provider's web services was denied. The client-side part interacts both with customer-side and provider-side web services.

Results

The custom web development services resulted in a web solution tailored to the Customer’s needs with a rich user interface that allowed controlling employees’ time and working schedule.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, WPF, XBAP, ASP.NET Web Services, C#, LINQ, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, MS SQL Server 2005, MS Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Internet Information Services.