Intuitive Software for Wellness Club Client Appointment Scheduling

Customer

The Customer was a prestigious beauty salon offering the full range of haircut, manicure and pedicure services.

Challenge

To make the business more successful and efficient the Customer decided to improve the internal processes by equipping each employee with a handy Pocket PC connected to the Internet. Each Pocket PC contained a pre-installed Appointment System application to book and track appointments with clients. The application helped to navigate through appointments as well as offered a client search function. The Solution communicated with the MySQL database on the Internet site and allowed to read and update the database.

The Customer decided to improve its legacy solution and integrate the existing database with a new application to preserve the web functionality as well as allow the new application to work with both the old and new appointment and client databases.

Solution

ScienceSoft team decided to develop a .NET web application connected to the MySQL database and processing all business logic, while the client – a .NET compact application – would run on the Pocket PC and upload data from/to the .NET web service.

The business and application logic of the final solution was divided into several layers:

• The solution provided a rich user interface with a set of calendars, appointment information, status updates, service selection forms as well as other functionality enabling the user to enter all the required information and send it back to the server. The application was developed using .NET compact framework for Windows Mobile platform, which allowed us to provide all the advantages of .NET to improve user experience.
• The business logic with validation and synchronization was processed at the .NET Web services layer. This tier contained all the data processing logic and allowed information exchange with the Pocket PC application.
• Data persistence was ensured at the MySQL database. This database was used to keep the legacy system alive.

Results

ScienceSoft team developed a complete solution that allowed the Customer to improve their day-to-day activities.

A database adapter for MySQL database made it possible to integrate the database with no extra development cost making it as easy as development for MS databases.

Technologies

.NET, Microsoft Visual Source Safe for the version control, TrackGear for bug tracking and reports.