SoftCo is a global supplier of document and process management solutions across multiple industry sectors. Spotlight IT Solutions Ltd. and Spotlight founder Craig McFadyen as an individual have been involved in a large number of projects with SoftCo.

eBA Process Manager Product

Description

Craig McFadyen held the position of Architecture Design and Development Engineer while working on this project which was the Development of the Core of SoftCo�s eBusiness Architecture (eBA) B2B suite named "Process Manager".

Process Manager is a workflow/scheduling system for launching custom COM objects to perform tasks in a predefined workflow pipeline/map.

An example of such a map was used in the workflow approval process of Requisitions in both the PrintOrigin.com and BuzzGolf.com marketplace sites.

When a requisition was submitted to the system it was routed to one or more people for approval.

This system incorporated a round robin scheduling system controlled by two NT services responding to events in transactional MSMQ queues. This resulted in a high capacity reliable system for processing requests which ensured "guaranteed delivery" of all requests

Technology:

The main technology used in the Process manager product was the use of Visual Basic COM objects running under Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). COM objects were used for both internal "System Level" process manager functions and for the business objects themselves. The Process Manager made extensive use of Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) synchronous and asynchronous transactional messages for delivery/receipt. A SQL Server database was used to facilitate the scheduling structures and extensive logging.

Description

When working on this product Craig McFadyen held the position of Head Developer and Team leader.

This product acted as a web interface to SoftCo's "SoftCo Enterprise" (previously called PC-Doc) document management server.

The product accepted searches and requests for Documents through any browser, forwarded these requests one or more "Web Concentrator" COM objects which performed the search/export operation.

The product has a number of components mostly written in Visual Basic, Components are as follows

• Initializer NT Service (Visual Basic)
• Switcher Program for request Queue management and Task assignment to Web Concentrators (Visual Basic)
• Web Concentrator COM Objects (Visual Basic)
• IIS Integration MTS COM object components (Visual Basic)
• Installation program to setup, SQL DB, MTS Packages, MSMQ Queues, NT Service (Wise Installbuilder)
• Online Help System and manuals (RoboHelp Office)
• Administrative Programs including log viewer and Admin Manager programs (Visual Basic)

The SoftCo Web product is an extremely scalable 3-Teir web application the full details of which is too technical and detailed to discuss in detail here. For information on this product please see the products section of the SoftCo site SoftCo Web Product...

Responsible for concept design to full lifecycle development of the product and management of 3-person team. The architecture used a Windows DNA 3-tier architecture incorporating SQL Server, IIS, MTS and MSMQ.

Tasks also included project management, customer support, technical documentation and supervision of large onsite installations.