The Customer provides a wide range of ophthalmic software, online business tools, and complementary technologies for professionals in the eyecare industry. The Customer is an industry leader in the electronic claims processing domain and processes over 14 million transactions annually.

The Customer owned a website builder and hosting product dedicated to eye care practitioners. They have hosted thousands of premium websites using their template-based website builder. However, the product posed the following challenges due to its design constraints:

• The design of the website builder would not allow the Customer to implement the solution at multiple locations supporting various local languages.
• The maintenance of the website builder was difficult.
• The cost of maintenance was high due to the licensed third party software.

Due to the issues mentioned above and restrictions with the current product, the Customer engaged AgreeYa to re-architect and redesign the website builder product as a stand-alone product with internationalization capabilities that would be easy to maintain.

The project scope included requirements gathering, proof-of-concept development, product development, testing, knowledge transfer, and product turnover activities.

Some of the project challenges included:

• Completing all activities in an aggressive 12-week timeline
• Developing an easy-to-use user interface for nontechnical users
• Developing the application to handle secure transactions
• Designing the application and the database to conform to i18n standards
• Developing the product using cutting-edge, open source technologies
• Delivering a completed product free from defects within the short timeline
• Developing the application to meet stringent performance and scalability requirements

Leveraging our O³ (onsite-offsite-offshore) delivery model, AgreeYa deployed a combination of on-site and offshore resources. The onsite resources handled project management, Customer meetings, timely responses to Customer queries, project documents, and review activities.

The offsite and off-shore resources handled system design, development, and testing activities. The use of off-shore resources facilitated faster completion of project deliverables.

AgreeYa used a customized Agile Project Management methodology for this project. AgreeYa conducted focus group meetings with Customer subject matter experts (SME) during the requirements gathering and user interface (UI) design phases. AgreeYa developed the UI design prototype and worked iteratively with the Customer SMEs in getting an approved design finalized.

AgreeYa redesigned the website builder product using the latest cutting-edge technologies such as Java/J2EE, and Struts, Tiles, and Spring frameworks. The Struts and Tiles frameworks were used for web-tier controllers and template-based application development. The Spring framework was used for developing the security component. A MySQL database was used for storing all application configuration and Customer site information.

AgreeYa successfully delivered the redesigned product within the aggressive 12-week timeline.

The Customer gained the following business benefits from the redesigned product:

• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by leveraging AgreeYa’s O³ delivery model
• Fast development and implementation lifecycle from the use of AgreeYa's Solution Delivery Accelerators
• Enhanced end user experience through a new, easy-to-use, rich user interface
• Reduced cost of ownership and maintenance, and removed dependency on licensed software, through the use of open source technologies
• Significant reduction in manual maintenance of product
• Increased ability to deploy the website builder product at multiple partner locations regardless of the local language

Hardware:
Dell Servers with Linux OS
Software and versions:
Java/J2EE, Struts, Tiles, Spring, i18n