Onea Office: Migrating a Flagship Application to the Web
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Onea Office supports law firms with all office related tasks such as time billing, case-management, relationship management and document storage. URL Contact
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| “We were able to shift our effort from programming hundreds of stored procedures to defining Business Rules and Business Component Structures. Basically, development moved to a higher level.” |
Onea IS-Consult, from The Netherlands, is a typical example of a successful ISV that decided to update the software platform of its flagship products to maximize the value delivered to its customers. Onea used Visual Studio .NET 2003 and DeKlarit to turn their flagship GUI based product into a Web-based solution. DeKlarit not only enabled Onea’s team to migrate its application to the web, it also enables them to maintain and expand their solution easily, and to deploy it on multiple DBMS, effortlessly.
“In the summer of 2003 we decided to investigate the possibility of moving from a Windows-based environment to a web based one for our Onea Office software,” says Maarten de Jonge, CEO at Onea. “The most important reasons for this change were the scalability and ease of deployment of the Web environment along with some versioning and maintenance issues at our customers’ offices.”
Onea Office uses more than 160 database tables and 400 screens. The development team at Onea knew that only a very structured approach would be successful in order to turn their windows based application into a web-based solution. Onea Office was originally developed in C++ and uses Microsoft SQL Server as its DBMS.
The company evaluated several development environments and decided that the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2003 was the platform that best suited their needs. However, after several tests they also found that they needed additional help to efficiently develop and maintain the application’s complex business framework.
“We evaluated DeKlarit for three months to be sure it would give us the features we wanted for the coming years,” de Jonge adds. “The use of Business Components in DeKlarit gave our team a better overview of the business side of the solution. We were able to shift our effort from programming hundreds of stored procedures to defining Business Rules and Business Component Structures. Basically, development moved to a higher level.”
“As an extra benefit, DeKlarit gave us the possibility to develop the application independently from the DBMS and from the user-interface layer. Thus keeping future migrations to other platforms open.”
“With the combination of Visual Studio 2003 and DeKlarit we moved efficiently to a web-based environment and could define most of our >business logic as DeKlarit Business Rules. This resulted in software that can be easily adjusted to future changes of the Business Model.”
“A key element of the transition with DeKlarit is that most of our development time is not used anymore on the database and business layer but on the user-interface.” This shift in development focus gave Onea the possibility of building specific web components to work directly with DeKlarit Business Components. This way, developers can now efficiently create customized web pages and also use the DeKlarit templates to generate standard pages. The result is an application whose look and feel can be easily customized to the requirements of different customers.
Onea was able to convert Onea Office from a windows based application into a web-based solution successfully. In the process, they also adopted a more powerful approach for future product development that essentially gives Onea an additional competitive advantage over other vendors. In the word of Onea’s CEO, “With less code we now create a more powerful application.” In addition, Onea can now target the preferred DBMS of their customers without additional work.
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