by Qasim Mehmood

I had an experience with a large enterprise solution for a huge pharmaceutical company. This particular company was facing major difficulties in managing administrative and training requirements and cost for SAP. Especially due to the recession, that time cost was becoming a huge factor in their overall operations!

New employees are joining the organization and old employees have marriages and other life changing events and when they need to use SAP bases HR system, it’s really complex, less intuitive and the company needs to train their users regularly which costs a lot. This is even more critical when your organization have couple of hundred thousands of employees.

Proposed Solution

I worked with them to design a generic solution which integrates SAP with SharePoint. This solution uses Infopath forms which guide users via a wizard approach to help fill out the form. We also designed a self-service application for SAP software. This application is basically an enterprise human resource software application that combines Microsoft Office SharePoint with the integration and control of SAP software. The solution simplifies the use of line-of-business systems while preserving data integrity and compliance with corporate policies.

Cost Saving

By going with this approach, the client reduced training cost and maintenance, costing less than a SAP solution!

Read more about SharePoint here!

by Qasim Mehmood

I was involved in an interesting problem in major public utility sector in US (electricity and gas). They faced huge accessibility and serviceability issues during Hurricane Irene (earthquake and flood) in mid-2011.

This client (an electricity company) is using SharePoint 2010 as the internet portal to the general public and users can come and see different services like bills, outage information, news etc.

This client faced unanticipated traffic during Hurricane Irene. Their site was unable to scale the magnitude of traffic effectively, creating substantial problems for the end users and business. Around 20 percent of registered and 80 percent of the anonymous users visited the site, and the number of users keeps on increasing. Mobile users significantly increased during the current year as well, so that is also a big factor.

This client now wishes to substantially increase their target peak traffic volume for the site to avoid such incidents in the future. Their infrastructure is scaled for 100K parallel users and daily 0.5 million users. During the Hurricane and Irene 4+ millions users visited the site every day with 200K parallel users and due to unanticipated traffic all infrastructure and servers were down or not responding well.

Different companies proposed different solutions like adding 50 to 100 more front end servers which will increase infrastructure like administration and resources. This solution cost was proposed in the millions and the client doesn’t want to put that much money for situations that may occur only once in 5 years, making the huge infrastructure useless in the case of no disaster or emergency.

What solution would you propose for this?

Proposed Solution

AAJ specializes in solution design and proposed this dynamic solution which fits according to their need. It will cost them a very minimal amount and it gives them an opportunity to redesign whole organization application strategy for end-users according to new mobile, iPhone and tablet usage trends.

The proposed solution has major 4 areas which need to be addressed:

1.      Mobile and Tablet Strategy

Understand mobile user’s patterns and develop iPhone and tablet applications so users don’t need to visit the website and the application can serve their needs on their phones or tablets.

Dedicated applications for tablet/iPhone devices to ensure that around 50 percent of the web users that prefer to visit websites through their handheld have the access to the services they want. However, this doesn’t choke off the resources resulting in any access problem for other users.

2.      Disaster Response Application Engine

In emergency and disaster situations, the disaster response application engine will take proactive actions like:

• Sending newsletters to registered users.
• SMS alerts for flood, earthquake, outages and other emergency situations.

3.      Users Management

There is a need to have a separate service mechanism for registered and anonymous users. 20% registered users and 80% anonymous users are visiting the site.

4.      On Demand Cloud Solution

With the current dedicated servers, there will be backup on-demand & proprietary on demand cloud servers always ready to serve as the dedicated servers whenever required.

The on-demand cloud server solution will be scheduled and deployed in minutes to work only ‘when required’ and they will go down automatically ‘when not needed anymore’. Scaling your cloud servers is much simpler than ever; you can add RAM, Disk Space and Bandwidth, instantly.

To maintain the current state, the cloud server will be updated every 3 months which will ensure that when their service is required the data available on them is recent.

Solution Architecture Diagram

Cost Saving

All these solution areas involved minimal investment and strategy redesign in comparison to adding 50 to 100 servers in infrastructure. Cloud servers are used when they are required and you only pay for the time you have used them. This flexibility allows your system (website) to create and destroy servers as needed, and only pay for the time you need.

In this model you will just have to pay for the cost of service and not the hardware which may or may not be required.

Read more about SharePoint here!