Partner Extranet Development

Business Case:

  • Allow Partners to manage their product Catalogue
  • Develop secure authentication mechanism for external users
  • Develop modules to enable sponsored partner status
  • Integrate partner logos in search results with redirect to their sites
  • An easy and friendly system that allows partners to manage and review reports on views etc.

Solution Features:

  • PHP5 Development & extension of an existing web site
  • Successfully extended using existing API
  • On time & within budget delivery of solution
  • Partner satisfaction assured through direct access to the product catalogue maintenance
  • Saved business efforts in managing the product catalogue

Engagement Highlights:

  • Successfully partnered with external Design Agency
  • Understood the existing development & reused the API
  • Ensured proactive feedback & design engagement through design agency
  • Iteratively developed following an agile methodology
  • Documentation provided to support future maintenance

Background

Client has a leading web portal dedicated for the bike community and technology community. The site provides product news and reviews, aids (including video and audio) and links to retailers selling Bikes related products and Services. The technology community site is the largest technical site in the UK and provides information on upcoming technologies & gadgets. It allows the technical community to share and comment and helps make informed decision on product selection. The website business model was based around advertisements and linked product catalogue of its partners. The existing solution required manual update of the product and was not user friendly.

Challenges:

The existing PHP based development had to be extended to enable partner modules that allowed the external partners to login and manage their product catalogues. The solution had to be integrated such that the live web site could continue to function without any issues while new features are launched. This required integration of search, sponsored partner status & partner product catalogues to the search results.

Design Agency Partnership

Surya partnered with a local design agency to extend their capability to deliver the solution. The design agency maintained the look and feel & solution design validation roles whereas Surya consultants were engaged to define functional specifications, technical specifications and development of the extension modules in an outsourced model.

Surya consultants undertook the existing PHP API knowledge transfer and documented the requirements using Process Workflow Diagrams to clarify the requirements and finalize the user interaction. The solution was proposed as four modules to be developed using PHP5:
User Module: This module ensured that the end user interaction was properly managed and implemented.

Administration Module: This module allowed management of shopping partners and their access details. This allowed controlled access and configuration of the shopping partners.

Partner Module:

This module allowed the partners to login to the system securely and manage their product catalogue as well as identify which pages the product should be displayed on.

Redirection Module: Count the redirections for billing and reporting purpose at the same time validate if the redirection link is valid.

Key Project Highlights were:

  • Iterative Delivery of Solution
  • On time & within budget delivery
  • Successful Design Agency partnership
  • End user training
  • Design Documentation