Major Motor Manufacturer
Scenario
Development of pilot eCommerce site for new car orders.
Situation
The client is a major motor manufacturer , and needed a pilot
eCommerce site for its European arm. The primary requirement
was to allow a customer to configure and customise any
vehicle within the company's range. In addition, the customer
was to be offered insurance and warranty with their vehicle,
and also a finance quote online, which would include the
ability to specify a vehicle for part exchange. At a later
stage, it was intended that the customer would be able
to opt to buy the vehicle online, for delivery through
the company's usual channels.
Charteris Role
Charteris was responsible for business analysis and design of the
complete system, including its integration into the rest
of the company's IT systems.
Charteris provided a technical lead consultant and a team of around
seven developers. We also complemented the client's own
team with additional development resource as required.
Solution
The entire site was produced as a tiered development using
Visual Basic components running within MTS or COM+ Component
Services providing the business logic. ASP pages were
used to interact with the components. All data was manipulated
as XML documents, with XSL style sheets being used to
render this as HTML/DHTML for both Internet Explorer and
Netscape Navigator 4+.
The team developed a common infrastructure for State Management
within a Web Farm environment based around XML technologies,
and a common solution to the CRM database synchronisation
made use of MSMQ and IBM MQSeries.
The software and technologies used were as follows: Microsoft
Tool Set, MS Visual Basic 6.0, MS Visual Interdev (HTML,
ASP, VBScript and JavaScript), MS Internet Information
Server, SQL Server 7.0, XML (MS XML Dom 2.0), XSL, MS
Transaction Server 2.0 and COM+ Components Services, MS
Message Queue, ADO 2.X, CDO, MS Windows NT4 later to migrated
to Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Visual SourceSafe, Internet
Explorer 4+, Netscape 4+, HomeSite, pcAnywhere, MS Terminal
Services and IBM MQSeries. The team made extensive use
of XML and XSL technologies so that data could be successfully
separated from presentation, and XML was also used as
a storage mechanism for object state, and session persistence.