Turning old into Real Estate gold

Project Description

Overview

For this project the client engaged App Sparq to design and build a brand new application for their Real Estate department. The purpose of this new application was to replace the existing application in MS Access and to provide an easy-to-use interface to manage the real estate data. This included data such as store and franchisee information, leases and sub-leases, and environmental and construction data. As part of this process, the existing data in the MS Access database was also migrated over to the new application.

The Old

The old application was built in MS Access and had a number of issues and limitations. The old app was extremely outdated and was difficult to use. It was not very secure and was difficult to maintain. It was only accessible via a desktop, and that too by a single user. It had a lot of scattered data that needed to be consolidated, and at the same time, a lot of irrelevant data that needed to be removed. Apart from all this, it did not have any built-in smarts for alerting the users regarding key dates.

The New

In comparison to the old app, the solution that we implemented is an easy-to-use responsive web application using ASP.NET. This means that the app is accessible from any browser on any device, and by any number of users. The new app was designed with security in mind; it is linked with the client's Active Directory to authenticate users, as well as for controlling permissions for different users. The new app has an interactive UI that that has been developed using the latest HTML and jQuery frameworks. Apart from having a modern front-end, the back-end has also been revamped. All the data was successfully migrated over from MS Access into MS SQL Server, and was consolidated so that it made sense to the user. The new database was designed with data integrity in mind so that no bad or redundant data can creep through. Lastly, the app uses SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) to create and display a wide variety of useful and complex reports. These reports are easily viewable in any browser, and can be downloaded and saved in Excel or PDF format.

The Effort

This project was successfully completed in just 8 weeks. The technologies used were:

• Front-End: ASP.NET with HTML and jQuery.
• Back-End: MVC architecture using C# and .NET.
• Database: MS SQL Server.
• Reporting: SQL Server Reporting Services.
• Security: Active Directory.
• Testing: nUnit, Selenium.