The Customer ranks as the world's No. 3 vendor for total PCs and No. 2 for branded notebooks. The Customer’s product lineup includes desktop and laptop PCs, PDAs, servers and storage, displays, peripherals, and e-business solutions for business, government, education, and home users. It employs more than 5,000 people supporting dealers and distributors in more than 100 countries. In order to sustain their rapid growth path, the Customer felt that customer service and channel enablement were critical success factors. In order to increase customer service and channel enablement with their India operations, the Customer wanted to develop an online certification program for their channel partners’ support engineers.

AgreeYa was contracted to assist the Customer in designing and developing a web-based, online test system that would be used to train and certify the support engineers. The technical complexities of the project included:

• Deploying a disaster recovery plan for providing the user with a seamless experience, especially during the process of taking an exam
• Managing a huge amount of content that would be generated through blogs and knowledge contributions
• Creating a robust system that would be extensible for future business needs
• Providing complete user security with respect to examination-related data.

AgreeYa delivered this project using an onsite-offsite delivery model. The requirements analysis, training, and roll-out were completed onsite, and the rest of the software development lifecycle was completed offsite. Regular conference calls and online meeting rooms were used for discussions and brainstorming. Weekly status reporting ensured that the customer was always aware of the schedule, progress, risks, and issues. In order to mitigate the technology challenges, the following strategies were adopted:

• Specific session and data management strategies were adopted to ensure that no data was lost while the user was taking the certification exam.
• AgreeYa developed a custom content management system that would allow for content authorization, workflow, and moderation to meet the Customer’s specific needs.

AgreeYa used the Microsoft .NET architecture and object oriented programming for extensibility and interoperability. XML/Web Services based interfaces were used to allow integration without compromising data security. The key advantages delivered include:

• AgreeYa’s Microsoft Gold Partnership allowed access to technical documentation, reusable frameworks, domain knowledge, and the latest technology updates.
• AgreeYa’s iLab Solution Delivery Accelerators helped accelerate the development lifecycle.

The application was developed using Microsoft Windows 2000, ASP.NET, C#, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, Visual Studio 2003, CSS, XML, VISIO, Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Reporting Services. The application was developed using Microsoft Windows Server 2000, Microsoft IIS Server 6.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and Microsoft .NET 2.0 technologies.