Enterprise Grade Cross-Platform Digital Training Experience
We helped a Canadian technology firm, ISAIX, build cross-platform, cross-device digital corporate training experience.
Background
IsaiX is a Canadian technology firm that offers employee engagement products and solutions that are being used by leading organizations and global brands in the US, Canada and the United Kingdom. These include professional services, government, high-technology, pharmaceutical, and financial service sectors.
Burst Tools® needed a complete transformation specifically targeting mobile products, and IsaiX contacted Net Solutions in 2010 to build it from scratch. This marked the beginning of the IsaiX-Net Solutions association, which brought about building other products, as well.
The Problem
Burst Tools® is a solution meant for document publishing and content consumption for making the learning experience more engaging for employees in an organization.
It was being used already by large enterprises and the federal government in Canada, but this was built several years ago. Initially, it was merely a desktop application designed in classic ASP. A couple of years later, it began to report performance issues since it wasn't scalable any longer. The owners also felt that, through this app, they could focus on the mobile customers to maintain pace with the growing mobile products' usage inside an enterprise.
The Solution
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Process and Engagement Model
Since one of the primary requirements was to rebuild Burst Tools® from scratch to cater to mobile devices, the primary question was whether to develop it with a native or mobile web experience. Mobile web is cross-device compatible and is cost-effective. However, both IsaiX and Net Solutions were not sure whether the experience with mobile web development will be as good as that in native development for this kind of application. In order to reach a logical conclusion, we decided to build a Proof of Concept (POC) where we tried developing the document editor - the most important and toughest part of the Burst Tools® using HTML5 and JavaScript. The POC was completed in about 4 weeks, bringing in the assurance that mobile web technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript were suitable for complete application's front-end development. Developing a POC also helped us overcome the uncertainties in the project and provided us clarity to estimate the man-hour efforts for the complete scope and provide the fixed price estimate to IsaiX.
Collaboration and Communication
Project collaboration was done using Basecamp and Jira. All project communication was done using email, phone calls, Go to Meeting and Skype.
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Technology Stack
Burst Tools® was developed by creating a three-layered multi-tenant and multi-version architecture in mind. We used .NET as the programming language. IsaiX also preferred .NET because the environment where this product was to be deployed was accustomed to Microsoft technologies
SQL Server was implemented as the database with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS for front-end development. The mobile front-end was developed using HTML 5, JavaScript and CSS.
Net Solutions helped us build software that enabled Banks and Pharmaceutical firms in US and Canada to engage their employees better using Digital Technologies.
The Result
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A new employee engagement experience
The new Burst Tools® application is faster, secure and scalable than ever before. Courtesy, its new architecture.
Caters to Enterprise Mobility Customers
The new Coach Technology® is also extended to mobile devices (iOS and Android) to cater to digital age employees who would like to have a mobile experience on the move.
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Better ROI And Cost Savings
Ever since we shipped the native experience in mobile web, we brought about significant financial savings and Return on investment for the customer.