Hyderabad.
August 24, 2012. Ray Business Technology today announced releasing of
Intranet portal to leading Engineering Solutions Company based out of
Bangalore, India. The client, QuEST
Global is a leading provider of outsourced engineering solutions to
fortune
enterprises
worldwide. It provides outsourced engineering services and
manufacturing,
and help global companies set up offshore manufacturing units in
special economic zones. With a "best-in-class" global
leadership team, The client is recognized as one of the largest pure
play engineering services player, providing integrated product
development and build solutions across the engineering services
value chain.
In
order to manage its workforce around the globe, The client needed
an
enterprise-wide Intranet solution. The planned Intranet was supposed
be one point solution for employee information, profiles, blogs,
forums, chat and various other forms of collaboration. The solution
needed to authenticate users against the Active Directory (AD) and
pull the user roles and access privileges from Client’s Oracle HRMS
solution and set the proper access roles accordingly.
Ray
Business Technologies studied The client’s Intranet requirement and
after several brainstorming sessions, they purposed QuEST Global
Kentico CMS for the implementation of their Intranet. Kentico
Enterprise CMS is a leading provider of Content Management Solution,
empowering enterprises to quickly build and deploy Intranet and
Internet Solutions.
Goals
The
client required an Intranet system with blogs, Forums , wikis, news,
events, newsletter modules, authentication with Active directory,
Access control mechanism based on their employee data table fields,
Versioning on documents with workflow, Employee search, Single
sign-on in a couple of months with less human resources to build it.
Further,
they wanted to have work group collaboration, exporting repeater data
into Excel sheet, Web analytics, integrating various third party
‘.net’ application on new Intranet site.
Challenges
Raybiztech
had challenges in updating users on daily basis from the external
database, maintaining roles of the users based on the employee
database fields that could change on daily basis, Single Sign-on,
modifying polls module to have user polled option recorded in the
database.
Solutions
1.
Authentication
against Active directory:
The client needed the user authentication to be done against the
Active directory (AD). Raybiztech
searched
the user name and password pair in the Active Directory using ‘.net’
API class.
2.
Console
application to insert users into Database: Getting
the users from the Oracle database to Kentico users table is not
single time activity as Oracle users data table constantly changes
with new joiners and appraisals. The client needed a console
application, which has to be scheduled to reflect the changes
happened to Oracle user’s table in the Kentico User’s table.
Raybiztech
developed a console application, which reads the Oracle user
data-table and inserts/ updates the Kentico user and users’ setting
table.
We
made use of User information provider class to achieve this. The
error logalso implemented for the administrator use.
3.
Single
sign on for Quest applications: The
client has more than 40 modules (application) that needed
authentication to access the modules , which resides on the different
server. So, the client asked for the single sign-on as well as single
sign-out for all these application when user log into the Intranet.
Raybiztech
created a Session
Interface page
in the same domain the application are in. Raybiztech also considered
security threats while passing the user information.
4.
Managing
Roles in QuEST Global’s scenario: QuEST
Global has the pages, modules with different security mechanism
applied on them based
on
the Roles. We need to set the user roles based on different
criteria’s
depending
on their user database fields.
As
the users are in thousands and roles are in tens, it was not a
feasible idea
to
set the user roles form the desk. So, Raybiztech created a table,
which
maintains
all roles names and the SQL query that fetches the users
for
respective Role. They also wrote a console application that reads
the
data-table from the database and sets the users to roles. We made use
of
the Kentico API to set the users to roles.
5.
CEO
Letters: The
client needed message from CEO to be displayed
on
the home page. A document type was created for CEO letters and
messages
from CEO letters to be displayed on home page using repeater
webpart.
6.
Events
and Holidays: The
client wanted to have a clear distinction while showing the Events
and Holidays on Intranet. Raybiztech used event
document
type and added an extra field 'Type' to the existing event type.
Based
on the type of the event entry, they used different colors to
differentiate
among the Holidays and Events.
7.
News,
Blogs and Forums: Access
control mechanism was implemented for news, blogs, and forums. Based
on the roles the access control mechanism has implemented for news,
blogs and forums.
8.
Organization:
The
organization page to show the details of the personnel
along
with picture to 3 levels from the top of the organization
structure.
In
Quest, The different OBU's and Enablers have different criteria to
select
the
top 3 level organization people. So, Raybiztyech used SQL data source
Webparts,
where they could execute the sql query.
9.
Site
map: Site
map page was created for showing all modules and different locations
of the organization on the map. Raybiztech created a site map page,
which displays the different locations of the organization by using
Google
embedded code by providing the longitudes and latitudes of the
different location of The client along with the details of the
location.
10.
World
Clock: As
The client has the business operations around the globe,it wanted to
have a world clock page for the marketing department as well as for
the employees. Worldclockserver.com is providing the embed code for
showing the world clock in a page. Raybiztech made use of the embed
code in a page and achieved the functionality needed.
11.
Polls:
The
client wanted to conduct online poll for employees. They also wanted
to store the user name and the option selected by user in the table
to see the poll results, which is not directly available in polls
module.
The
default polls web part uses cookie for storing information. But it's
not
storing
the information about user and polled option. Raybiztech customized
pollsviewer
web part to store user information in the data base. If a user has
polled
for a particular item, he can't poll again.
12.
Page
feedback: The
client wanted a page feedback feature on the footer. The feedback
could only be seen by the desk administrator. Raybiztech made use of
the message board feature here to achieve this.
13.
Send
URL: The
client wanted to have a “send URL/page to a friend” feature on
the footer of the Portal. Raybiztech created a form that links to a
'send url' link on the footer. When the user click on the link , it
redirects them to the send URL page.
14.
Add
to my favorite: Raybiztech
created a page that links to 'Add2 favorite' link on the footer. When
a user click on that link, it will redirect them to “Add to
favorite” page, where the user can provide the friendly name for
that URL. To achieve this functionality, Raybiztech created a custom
Webpart containing two text boxes and a button. The text boxes are
used to enter the URL and User Friendly name of the favorite.
15.
Employee
search: We
made use of smart search box, placed on the header of the page for
employee search as well as for the content search. When clicking on
the search employee icon after entering the data in the text box ,it
will redirect to a Employees page. In the Employees page we made use
of employee-search filter web part. We customized this web part by
adding different fields like OBU, COE and Program for filtering. And
also we made use of Data Source and repeater web parts to display the
filtered employees.
Key
criteria for selecting Kentico CMS
- Building the Intranet site faster with less resources.
- Kentico CMS 6.0 was found to be having more modules that the client asked for after making comparative study of different CMS's available in the market.
- Fast Configurable access control mechanism on blogs, forums, pages, documents.
- Easily maintainable document management system with workflows.
- Content staging option while working with different versions of the hosted site.
Ray
Business Technologies is the leading IT Solutions company, proving
Enterprise IT Services to Fortune Clients worldwide. They have top
technology alliances and matured processes and systems, helping them
to provide world class solutions to clients. They are ISO 9001:2008
Certified and a NASSCOM and ITsAP member. Please visit
www.raybiztech.com for more
information.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
- Corporate Performance Management Systems
- Embedded Systems (Linux)
- Portal & Content Management (Sharepoint/Drupal/Kentico/DotNetNuke/ Liferay)
- Company Intranet System (Custom/Sharepoint/DotNetNuke/ Liferay)
- Human Resource Management (HRMS)
- Enterprise Mobile Applications (Android/iPhone)
- CRM Solution (Microsoft Dynamics CRM/vTiger/SalesForce/SugarCRM/ Custom)
- E-commerce (Magento Ecommerce/OpenCart/Prestashop)
- Blogs / forums (Wordpress/myOwnSpace)
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