Alert Server

Abstract

• Customer is software development company focused on developing project management software. They have lots of customers who use their product, which name is Project Office.
• The Project Office is project management tool, built on client-server technology. It provides standard set of project management functions, such as resource management or planning.
• There is one more satellite product, Project Office Express, which provides Web access to timesheets information.

Purpose of the Project

To produce highly customizable system for monitoring project databases and notify users about changes..The system should allow creating user-defined rules for notifications..The system must be flexible enough to be able to be easily customized to monitor different databases.

Objectives

• To be able to monitor any changes made to a project stored in the Project Office database.
• To be able to customize the system to work with database of other product or other version of Project Office.
• To be able to customize a set of information in the database, which can be monitored by the system.
• To be able to customize rules of how the system detects that something happens.
• To be able to customize schedules of rules checking.
• To be able to subscribe users, groups and roles, like Project Manager to alerts and to prevent sending notifications to particular user.
• To provide a Web-based interface, which will allow to configure rules remotely.

Customer Requirements

Software platform:

• Windows NT 4.0 .Windows 2000 
• MS SQL Server,
• MS Transaction Server/COM+
• Active Server Pages

Hardware platform:

• Intel PCs

System Architecture

Solution

• Three-tier system, having all the logic on the application server.
• Very flexible data structure, based on the set of meta-information describing target database. This meta-information is stored in the system database together with alert rules and can be customized in order to allow monitoring different data sources.
• Flexible system for defining rules for alerts. Each rules can be combined from several conditions.
• Flexible roles system, allowing to define different notifications for different users (for example, for project resources and project managers) and filter the information, which can be sent to each role. The roles system is customizable as well and described by the meta-information.
• Virtual properties system, which allows to encapsulate complex data of project management system database into simple intuitive concept of properties.

Key Benefits

• Meta-information based system, which allows to configure the system to work with very wide range of relational databases. .The behavior of the system is also defined by the set of meta-information. This allows to change functionality without writing a line of code.
• Taking advantages of MS ADO technology, the system is able to monitor database on different servers, such as Oracle or others.
• Component based architecture, which makes system support much easier.
• Argussoft’s skillful personnel can very quickly deploy this application in a company of any size. Component structure of the system allows customers to choose only needed features. Because of the user-friendly interface and powerful localization tools, the customer’s personnel can be trained within a few weeks.