Hyderabad. August 24, 2012. RayBusiness 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 Solutions 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.
Their main services offerings are:
·
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)
·
Blogs / forums (Wordpress/myOwnSpace)
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