Australia local government SharePoint portal

The Client

The client is a statutory authority established under the Queensland Building Services Authority Act 1991. Its role is to regulate the building industry through the licensing of contractors, educate customers about their rights and obligations, make contractors aware of their legal rights and responsibilities, handle disputes fairly and equitably, protect consumers against loss through statutory insurance, implement and enforce legislative reforms and where necessary prosecute persons not complying with the law. Up to this day, the client was providing its web users online searches of the Insurance Register allowing users to check whether an existing property was insured and seek its history. In alignment with its business processes and with objective to provide better and more comprehensive services while being more cost effective, the client turned to SENSO to help develop the ecommerce portal which would provide electronic services delivery via the internet including financial transaction.

What the client wanted

The ecommerce project was to implement a modern and user friendly web site with leading edge and secure technologies to enable online business transactions and access to the client’s knowledge base for clients.

The objectives of the project was to:

• Implement Enhanced User Experience capabilities for the Authority’s Website to satisfy customer, partner and internal business needs.
• Enable online licence and financial renewals.

This includes:

• Confirming the business requirements for the Enhanced User Experience component of the Website.
• Defining an appropriate solution framework to address these business requirements.
• Purchase / development and implementation of application software to satisfy these business requirements.
• Selection, purchase, commissioning, and internal management of the software and hardware infrastructure required to deliver the Enhanced User Experience functionality.

Benefit sought

SENSO’s approach

Development was divided into 4 phases spanning from November 2008 until January 2010. The first stage included the development of the “search for license” and ”search for owner builder” and was put live on February 2009 in order to promptly provide the updated functionality to the web users. Phase 2 included user registration and an extensive set of services including a “nominate representative” module and a “purchase insurance” module. At this stage, the ecommerce feature of the portal was enabled allowing users to make purchase online. Phase 3 and 4 would include additional services integrating a wider range of the client’s business processes. It also would include a complete accessibility review to comply with Australia strict accessibility policies for governmental websites.

One of the important features of this project is the contract on which the client and SENSO based itself. This project indeed distinguished itself through:

• The tight coupling between the development team in China and the development team in Australia
• The duration of the project ( 1 year +)
• The flexibility needed for change management

Based on these requirements, a team was dedicated to the project following our Offshore Development Center model. A team based of 2 full time developers were assigned to the project and given the responsibility to develop the technical solution as well. A project manager was assigned to the project as the unique point of contact between the client and the team and given the responsibility to propagate information and remove barriers to progress of the project. Based on the needs of the project, additional resources such as graphic designer or testers were assigned to the project to ensure completion of all tasks to a high degree of quality. Our engineers first familiarized themselves with high level documentation then went a level deeper by reading the use cases for each module. Development was conducted following a MVC model on .NET and SharePoint technologies. Microsoft Enterprise library was used in order to standardize database access as well as data encryption ensuring a high security level. Templates were managed using SharePoint master pages component and the controller layer was developed using C# classes. Database was Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

Benefits

The Supplier – Customer cooperation was vastly improved using SENSO’s ODC model Functionalities were developed with a high level of customization following ODC adaptive process welcoming changes at any time. The interfaces were clear, simple and intuitive. The system was easy to use with minimal training.