Placement Report: Website Design, Data Import and Support

Acknowledgments

I will like to thank the whole team at Calculus Software Solutions Ltd, for welcoming me for

the whole year. The whole team provided me with in depth information about their specialist areas and deepened my knowledge of different aspects; I worked on though out the year.

I will like to thank specially my supervisor, Rupert Woolger, for providing me with support

and extensive information though out the year. However I will like to thank James Lawrence as well for supporting me throughout the project of RP Convert.

2

Contents

1.  Executive Summary  4

2.  Introduction  4

2.  Support  5

2.1  Second Line Support  5

2.2  Customer Installation  6

2.3  Sales  8

3.  Web Development  9

4.  Data Import  11

5.  Conclusion  12

6.  Figures  14

3

1. Executive Summary

I spent my placement year working for Calculus Software Solutions Ltd, a company that

provides business systems to the independent electrical retailer market. My primary role was as a 1st and 2nd line support advisor. I was also tasked with designing and building an integrated website solution based on an existing specification. I was also heavily involved with training, installation and data import for one of the clients.

My placement required me to learn to work to deadlines, both by myself and in a team environment. I learned SQL and ASP.net in order to design the website, and had to familiarise myself with both the application front end and database design of the company's flagship product, NCompass, in order to develop and support this new offering to Calculus' customers.

2. Introduction

Calculus Software Solutions Ltd has developed business software for Electrical Retailers which is called NCompass. This is a developing product that the company has launched in 1999. It was established in what was effectively a monopoly market, where there were a small number of very well established competitors. One unique selling point for NCompass was that it was a Windows based application with a free and relatively short development cycle, allowing customers to request new features for the system without incurring expense over and beyond that of an incredibly competitive support contract.

The business itself is a very small business with only eleven members of staff, which leads to overlapping in what duties are carried out by specific people within the hierarchical structure. A diagram of the working structure within the company is shown in Fig 1 to outline not only the links between the different roles within the structure of the company itself, but what impact this has on the day to day tasks expected from someone in one of those roles.

I was employed within the company as a first line support advisor, while working on an

individual project of building an integrated website for NCompass. Whilst NCompass is used

4

primarily as an electronic point of sale system, it qualifies as a business system due to its ability to analyse sales, agreement and stock information and produce data that can be used for accounting.

The NCompass application is a standard format stand alone application within Windows, which accesses customer data from either an Access database or a SQL2000 server depending on the particular needs of the company. This stands as another selling point for NCompass, as the two main competitors for the company are both Linux applications with text-based interfaces. Customers with multiple branches use their program under a federated architecture, which is to say that each individual shop maintains a copy of the database on a local server, but where changes are mediated by replication from a central publisher at Head Office. This is in direct contrast to the company's main competitor, where all remote sites are required to connect to the head office system directly, meaning that if there are any problems with internet connectivity then one or more branches are unable to trade using the system.

The following report will explore my different duties at Calculus, ranging from dealing with customers through helping them resolve their support issues to developing a dynamic website, which interacts with NCompass and also being involved with converting data from competitors’ software to data that can be used by NCompass.

2. Support

2.1 Second Line Support

Second line support within Calculus is intended to supplement the knowledge provided by the first line support. It focuses less on the day to day running issues for NCompass and more on the background database; for example correcting primary key duplication.

Initially I was assigned as a first line support; however as working on individual project with the website and having participated in a detailed customer installation, I was quickly moved to second line support. I had all the relative knowledge needed to engage in the more

5