The 3rd generation solution from IFN uses Visual WebGui as its platform

Israeli File Net VP Sales and Marketing: “Presenting DriveU UI (Visual WebGui is embedded) is one of my favorite parts; you can see the looks on the audience faces, they are very impressed with the richness and responsiveness of the web UI”

Abstract
IFN is one of the largest Israeli software houses. Its solutions are implemented as the organizational ECM (enterprise content/document management) and BPM (workflow) systems in Israel's top banks, insurance companies, cellular providers and government agencies. IFN chooses to use Visual WebGui as the platform for its 3rd generation solution – DriveU. The solution enables IFN to offer, for the first time both rich functionality & interactivity without compromising on performance and web accessibility.

Business needs
As IFN shifted from a provider of turn key projects to a supplier of complete solutions for content and process management the need for a thorough and generic web solution arose.

IFN had developed several solutions (WINS and WINFlow) in that field. However, they only provided either application richness or web accessibility but never both. As a result, IFN needed to develop a solution that would assist accumulating all the requirements and needs that customers demanded and packaged them into a complete solution while offering rich functionality, interactivity and at the same time web accessibility.

Organizations must effectively organize and retrieve enterprise content, optimize customer service and improve staff productivity in order to survive in today’s competitive environment. When implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) or business process management (BPM) solution, the organization needs a quick deployment with minimal disruption to its existing environment. At the same time, the solution must be user-friendly for easy adoption and optimization with strong integration with existing organizational systems.

The 3rd generation solution from IFN needed to offer all these features while providing shorter development time and maintainability.

The Solution
At the time, many IFN customers used WINS which is a client-server solution. As a client-server solution, WINS provides very rich applications, providing customers with a range of features and functionalities that meet their operational and business needs. In order to provide a solution without the compromise between rich application functionality/interactivity and a web application, IFN searched for a platform that will enable it to:

• Keep all the rich features and functionalities such as:
  • Enhanced search capabilities
  • Enhanced lists sorting
  • Dynamic Data Entry and Forms enabling custom layouts.
  • Combining Tabs to maintain the user’s flow of work (i.e. a new tab is opened for each new search results).
  • Provide massive user interaction screens to expose as much functionality as possible within each view.
• Shorten development time and development cycles including maintainability and clear source code.
• Provide performance and productivity similar to a desktop application.
• Use enhanced UI related design patterns such as MVC, Observer and other well known patterns.
• Provide dynamic rendering and customizability of UI elements according to the customer needs.
• Leverage the company’s existing skill sets of desktop development.

IFN’s R&D development department decided to perform a “proof of concept” (POC) process which was aimed to check those needs. 3 different approaches were chosen to be further evaluated during this POC process:

1. Visual WebGui
2. Classic ASP.NET with AJAX
3. HTC - HTML Components (the technology on which Outlook web access is based on)

The results were very sharp in favor of Visual WebGui as observed by IFN CTO & VP R&D Eddy Fishman: “In a remarkably short time in comparison to any estimation of web development of such complex UI scenarios, we fully achieved the huge amount of functionality”. These are the main aspects evaluated in the POC:

• Productivity - Visual WebGui presented a WinForms like API and development paradigm which had cut the UI development cycle by at least 70%.
• Performance and bandwidth usage - With Visual WebGui response times were dramatically faster and used the narrowest bandwidth.
• Compliance with design pattern supportive frameworks such as UIP2 – Using Visual WebGui brought more than 90% compliance while others were around 20%.

Benefits
With Visual WebGui as a platform, DriveU delivers real business added values as well as a rich, web based, user interface. It allows the user to focus on business transactions, increasing end user's productivity by gathering all relevant content and process information in a single point. “With Visual WebGui we could actually concentrate on added business values of the system without worrying that the web platform will not be able to hold it and almost completely ignore any web implementation complexities.” Eddy Fishman (CTO & VP R&D).

DriveU is a pre-built business template offering unique business added values such as major savings in time and costs and significant risk reduction. “DriveU field developers (which are responsible of implementing DriveU on customers’ sites) can easily add or change business logics and UI functionality due to a unique “Interception” methodology we have implemented within the DriveU platform.” said Eddy Fishman.

Due to a WinForms proven productivity development paradigm of Visual WebGui, the single layered and fully object oriented UI source code enables DriveU to be flexible and maintainable very easily. Providing extensibility model and making it possible for basic level developers to maintain the system with no prior knowledge except for .NET development.

DriveU presents many benefits to the organization:

• Proven & Mature solution
• Flexible & Adjustable system
• Dramatic Risk Reduction
• Quick implementation
• Business added values
• Fast ROI

Comparing to other equivalent solutions on the market, DriveU brings an extremely sophisticated business oriented system based on a desktop like UI which is practically unlimited by traditional web limits. DriveU provides a better productive ECM/BPM system than any other smart client solution, and requires no specific installation on the client.

Yasmin Marom (VP Sales and Marketing): “Presenting DriveU UI is one of my favorite parts; you can see the looks on the audience faces, they are very impressed with the richness and responsiveness of the web UI”. DriveU capabilities also include the following unique features:

• Smart filing rules - determine document storage location according to user defined indexing characteristics for content organization and implementation of working methodologies within the enterprise. DriveU filing rules assist in minimizing user errors and simplifying workflow by creating a common business filing language.
• An innovative user interface/desktop - employs advanced AJAX techniques to deliver usability and functionality similar to a desktop client for easy adoption. DriveU enables full user interface customization; quick response time based on low bandwidth usage, minimal mouse clicks, and search tab bookmarks to maximize productivity, and Microsoft Office™ integration.
• Enrich and optimize use of the BPM system - allowing users to view tasks from different queues on a single desktop. An advanced task allocation by qualifications, load balancing, according to the company’s organizational structure and more. Business logic for task assignment improves productivity by permitting users to sort and prioritize jobs and provide relevant information when needed through linking or direct access.

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