Business

Our CRM solution for Assets Management has a number of predefined main entities (Account, Contact, Prospect/Client, Manager/Vendor, Calendar, Task), and many secondary entities linked to the parent main entities. Relationship between a main entity and a different main entity or itself are Many-to-Many. Such flexibility is required to adequately capture the relationships in today’s businesses – consider how Accounts can be linked or aggregate with other Accounts in Family Offices; Contacts have connections with other Contacts; Tasks have intertwined nature in RFP process.

Users with administrative permissions are able to add other entities or customize behavior of the default ones. All system and user settings, presentation layouts and data structures will be stored in the database as meta-data, which will make it easy to change any labels or frames; add frames; customize field behavior including adding new fields, converting field data type, adding lookup tables and lookup fields; translate application to a different language, etc. Use of meta-data will allow us to pre-set “templates” for different vertical markets or flavors of the same market (e.g. Traditional Asset Management vs. Hedge Funds vs. Funds of Hedge Funds vs. Family Offices vs. Law Offices vs. Accounting Offices).

The meta-data is used by our powerful ad-hoc report generator to generate reports and mailings – both in tabular and presentation formats, including charting capabilities. Mail Merge and Mass E-mail campaign functions will be available directly from within our product, with automated recording of the campaign for historic and compliance purposes.

Documents are stored directly in the database for security and access management. Other modules – standard or custom, such as Document Management, Historic Fund Transaction Management, etc. can be plugged in at a later time; and via registration with the meta-data seamlessly incorporate in the application GUI.

Workflow automation features allow for effective management of repetitive tasks such as RFP process, periodic (e.g. quarterly) reporting, etc.

Support for themes and layout customization, dashboards allow users to adjust the application to their particular preferences.

The dedicated client’s front-end uses the Outlook GUI metaphor – de-facto standard in Windows OS applications.

MediCOM is a CRM software system for Healthcare Management. The system is customized for work-related healthcare evaluators, which adds specific conditions and regulatory constraints to standard requirements of general practitioners and hospitals.

Terms

Sanitary Document

The sanitary document is a report that contains detailed assessment of patient’s heath from the point of view of risks associated with patient’s work description (occupation and work duties) in the current period. The most important part of the assessment is doctor’s conclusion whether or not the patient’s health is compatible with the duties of his work description.

As sanitary document’s cover periods of patient’s life, patient’s life can be viewed as a chain of continuous uninterrupted and non-overlapping periods, each period associated with one sanitary document.

Since there is 1-to-1 correspondence between such periods and sanitary documents, sometimes term “sanitary document” is used to refer to a period rather than the document itself. For example we can say “current sanitary document” to denote records of medical information (such as appointments, test, vaccination, patient’s personal history, etc.) created within current period.

Risk

Government or other regulations mandate for each risk (or group of risks) how long the periods between two consecutive sanitary documents is, and what tests/procedures and vaccinations a doctor must administer to the patient.

Thus, if in a certain period a patient has professional risk A, and this risk requires that some test be taken, a doctor must include this test’s results in the sanitary document.

The system provides doctor a few easy ways of assigning risks to patients and tests for these risks. For this, a doctor can combine risks into a group (called homogeneous group of risks) and combine a list of tests/procedures and vaccinations into a group (called medical protocol)

One homogeneous group can be assigned a few medical protocols.

A patient can (but does not have to) be assigned one homogeneous group. A person must be assigned at least one (but can have multiple) medical protocol, either directly or via a homogeneous group. The patient then will inherit risks associated with these protocols. In addition doctor can assign individual (i.e. not coming from medical protocol) risks to the patient.

Key Types of patient’s medical information in the system

• Work medical history (one record is created per evaluation cycle)
• Personal medical history (one record is created per evaluation cycle)
• Family medical history (one record is created per evaluation cycle)
• General Test (one record is created per evaluation cycle)
• Specialized Test/Procedure (multiple records per evaluation cycle)
• Vaccination records (multiple records per evaluation cycle
• Attachments: sanitary documents themselves; test results; vaccination results or signed refusal to have vaccination, etc. (multiple records per evaluation cycle)

Cycle of Evaluation

A set of tests/procedures and vaccinations for the current period, along with all doctor’s appointments make a cycle of evaluation. This term is another 1-to-1 notation for sanitary document and its period.

Use Case

From execution flow standpoint, which is close to timeline but is not identical, doctor’s work on each patient within each period can be divided into three broad steps:

• Step 1: See patient, perform interview/general examination, give out referrals for tests/vaccinations
• Step 2: Collect all test and vaccination results
• Step 3: Complete the cycle of evaluation; close all records, generate and send sanitary document

Step 1

Per each cycle of evaluation a patient visits doctor on the appointment day scheduled in advance, and during this visit doctor:

• Adds Sanitary Document record, in which:
• Populates current work medical history record and makes its status “closed”
• Conducts interview and gives out questionnaire; based on this info populates current personal medical history record  and makes its status “closed”
• Conducts interview and gives out questionnaire; based on this info populates current family medical history record and makes its status  “closed”
• Conducts general examination of the patient and populates current general test record and makes its status “closed”
• Adds specialized test and vaccination  records for patient, and gives patient referrals for these procedures; the status of records is “open”
• Populates duration of current appointment record; changes status of the record to “closed”, and links it to the current sanitary document 

Step 2

After that patient takes specialized tests and vaccinations; and over short period of time the results are delivered to doctor.

As the results of tests/vaccinations keep coming in, doctor attaches test/vaccination result documents to the specialized tests and vaccination records; populates a few fields with his conclusions, and changes status of the records to “closed”

Step 3

After all specialized tests and vaccination records are closed, doctor:

• Populates Summary record in the sanitary document as to whether or not patient’s health is compatible with his work duties, and changes status of the Sanitary Document to “closed”
• Generates sanitary document report  for this period and sends it to employer
• Adds a new appointment record for next cycle of evaluation

Notes

From the standpoint of timeline, the process may be slightly different from the execution flow standpoint given above, in that:

1. A doctor may conduct some or all of specialized tests and administer some or all of vaccinations himself during patient’s appointment, thus steps 1 and 2 will occur at the same time
2. Conversely, it may be that for various reason step 1 takes more than one appointment, or doctor himself wants to perform some of specialized tests and vaccinations on a different day. In such case a doctor creates another appointment record for the patient; links it to the current sanitary document record and if so desired to the original appointment record. The original appointment record may be marked as “follow-up appointment scheduled” to draw doctor’s attention
3. Before the patient’s visit a doctor may already have a sanitary document record created for the current cycle of evaluation. The reason for that is b/c patient’s work description – information to be entered to the work medical history record – usually comes in advance from the employer, and it is doctor’s choice to keep it on file and enter it in the system at the time of patient’s visit, or do so upfront.

Entities

The information below is description of information stored in entities rather than database objects.

Patient

Patient’s entire medical record (a.k.a. chart) is stored in the system. One patient has one chart.

Terms “chart” and “patient” can be used interchangeably when referring to patient’s medical information.

The patient’s chart contains the following information:

Sanitary Document

Sanitary document as described above is a slice of patient’s information per one cycle of evaluation. As such it contains the following information:

 Appointment

Appointments are used strictly for scheduling. The record has same information as appointment in Outlook if not less; what’s important is date-time started, finished, purpose of visit. Details of appointment, such as general test results, etc. are entered into Sanitary Documents immediately, and not duplicated in the appointment record itself.

Colored lookups are used to mark appointment based on various criteria, such as status (open/closed/followup required), overdue/rescheduled, and so on.

Appointments are always linked to a patient; appointments may not be linked to a sanitary document but this is very unlikely.

Specialized Test & Vaccination

Test and Vaccination records have date and time similar to Appointments but rather than scheduling the purpose of the records is to make sure patients don’t go unprotected b/c a condition is unchecked or a vaccination period has expired.

For what information is available at present, test and vaccination records contain just a few fields (mostly lookup – typology of test; status; etc.) and result status (OK / not OK / need more focused examination)

Test and Vaccination records almost certainly have attachments, which should also be linked to the parents sanitary document.

Tests and Vaccinations are always linked to a patient and to a sanitary document.

Moreover, the application had to be convenient in use, and provide means of customizing the report layout and the way the information is sliced and diced before it gets to the screen. Combined with configurability and settings persistence it allowed users to focus not on each and every particular report, but rather on the business rules user has in their mind.

Therefore our goal was to create a client application with user interface unified across different data providers and supplemented with means of convenience and handiness in everyday use.

Please check what we got to:

As you can judge, the application has a skinnable and configurable user interface, and the report could be easily customized to let you review exactly what you are looking for. Once configured correctly, it allows user to look through their custom BI views with great ease and fluency. Moreover, the currently viewed data could be immediately exported to a PDF or Excel document.

We managed to provide the customer with the following supported data source types:

• Microsoft Analysis Services (OLAP server)
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft Access Databases
• ODBC driver support
• *.cub files support

Note, there are two options available in terms of data-processing distribution:

• to connect to an OLAP server (which performs all the required OLAP transformations remotely);
• to open a plain (wide) data-table and perform all the necessary transformations right on the client machine. That was made possible thanks to the DevExpress know-how component named PivotGrid.

You can filter data, you can see automatically calculated totals, and after all, you can even add some manually defined (with formula) data columns which will display exactly what you design them for.

Indeed, the end product became a universal and convenient tool in the world of data mining and multi-dimensional analysis.

Such mobile devices are powered with different software platforms inside, and each of them has its own application market. The thing is, the native applications require developers to use specific tools and approaches to create one for each platform. It leads to either narrow efforts outcome or increased product development cost as long as you need your product to be available on every platform.

Cost-effective solution

However, there is a universal toolkit based on innovative web-technologies allowing developers code the application once and run it everywhere. The Sencha Touch framework made it easy to develop mobile applications that look and feel native on Android, BlackBerryOS, and iOS platforms.

We here in FulcrumWeb currently have a few projects in progress based on this very technology, and we got rather positive feedback about it in terms of both easiness of development and power of the end-product.

Check it out

To demonstrate the capabilities of the framework we created a small demo application running fluid on mobile devices, and even on the desktop versions of Google Chrome or Apple Safari.

If you have an idea or a requirement for a multi-platform mobile application with neat and native-like UI, please submit an RFP on our site.

This application is nothing more but a web-oriented bug-tracking system providing advanced data presentation technologies thanks to the new platform from Microsoft which Silverlight is. This system is simple and comprehensive in structure (and quite easy in implementation thanks to our RAD framework!), it clearly demonstrated the potential of Silverlight as a platform for remote business applications with some desktop-class user interface – fast, responsive, having smooth and liquid animations and wide range of ways to present information effectively.

Technologies used: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008, WCF, ASP.NET.

Themes

The application is based upon very rich and visually attractive platform from Microsoft: Silverlight, and therefore no wonder we wanted to make use of one of platform’s most strong advantages. We designed the application with theming support in mind and are proud of the results: using skins technique you can easily transform application look and feel: you can use different colors or textures, drop shadows, add fluent animations, correct the layouting parameters (like paddings, margins, borders etc).

Security

The security subsystem makes use of the profound RAD framework experience, and consists of a developed system based on users and roles allowing to regulate the vertical security (access rules for different entities applied to roles), and the horizontal security (when specifically enabled entities comprise different access levels to literally each record).

Localization

Thanks RAD framework, the application turns out to be completely localizable.

Our company has developed a complex solution – a software application optimizing you time for effective document management while reviewing, managing and evolving your human resources. The application is customized to fit the IT industry requirements and is currently used internally by our company. It is based upon our RAD Framework new Silverlight frontend, and thus is a great example of a Rich Internet Application (RIA).

Technologies used: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008, WCF, ASP.NET.

Themes

The application supports immediate look-and-feel update based on user’s preferences.

For now it has two complete themes available right from the application main menu:

Security

The application has a developed security system allowing for both vertical and horizontal security.

Localization

Thanks to our RAD Framework, the application is totally localizable. Moreover, the administrator can edit the translation values in the real-time mode right from the application user interface.

[series of screenshots: languages grid, editing a string]

The team of FulcrumWeb professionals possesses the necessary experience to develop applications for the Silverlight platform living on Windows Phone 7.0-7.5 devices. You could easily check out our blog and list through the case studies done by us on top of this technology.

We would be glad to see your request for proposals, analyse the requirements thereafter, and make an estimate for your project. Feel free to contact us!

In essence, this project was very similar to our previous mission accomplished for a different backend (IBM FileNet P8).

Thus, we used exactly the same UI approach and theme, however we approached to the functionality from a different direction. There are some major differences between FileNet and Sharepoint (like impossibility to Demote document version, or the fact there is just one content file per document possible in Sharepoint as opposed to FileNet where you can store several attachments per logical document). And for sure there are much more differences between the platforms underneath, in terms of API and some concepts standing behind.

We managed to provide user with every major feature the standard SharePoint 2010 Server shell has enabled by default. Apart from some basic document browsing, filtering, sorting and paging support, we also have implemented the advanced search feature allowing to search through a whole document library or any of its subfolders. Having content displayed, created, and edited properly, we dived deep into implementation of the actions available for folders and documents. Check in, Check out, Version History, Permissions control and even Launch Workflow were reinvented with a brand new UI giving some more comfort and convenience to the end-user.

[series of screenshots: (1) content browser showing list of documents, (2) the one with filter and page size open, the one of the Search form, (3) the one of the object editing screen, (4) the one with document selected and Action menu open, (5) the one with Version history shown, (6) the one with Launch workflow shown]

At last we were faced with the Dashboard task. There was no clear indication how it should look and work like, but we just knew we had to keep things going simple, easy to understand, and thus – easy to use. At the same time, we had to provide at least the same level of customization power to the end-user as it had been before with the Workplace XT dashboard interface. So we decided to start from there, and functionally recreated the same approach, however made it in a more clean and straightforward user interface so it is a pleasure to use it.

Workflows

In the scope of the project we also covered the Workflows area. In particular, we designed several screens:

1. Inbox - for end-users to see the tasks currently assigned directly upon them, to edit them, add/remove attachments, and after all save or complete them.
2. Queues (Public Inboxes) - for queue participants to see the queued tasks with the ability to reassign any to themselves.
3. Active Workflows - the list of active workflows user has participated in.
4. Task Tracker - for tracker-users, to review the entire step-history of tracked workflows with all parameters/associated data listed.

Settings

The application settings system supposes existence of three settings levels, each one has the corresponding priority:

• default settings – factory provided values;
• global settings (set up by the administrator) which could override the default ones;
• user settings - just a fraction of what is available in the global settings, and they could override some of the global ones.

Security

Security of the application consists of two parts:

• the application level functional permissions which regulate the subsystems users have access to. For example, some users could be prohibited of use of workflows (if they are supposed to stay in the Content section).
• the FileNet level security which controls user’s access to object stores, folders and documents, as well as Inbox and Public Inbox items available.

Application provides the means to edit both of the above as long as the current user possesses the necessary permissions.

[series of screenshots: (1) application global configuration shown, (2) per-user configuration shown, (3) FileNet security for a document shown]

Functionality: standards covered

We considered the existing products named Workplace and Workplace XT as approximately the standard content browsers for the platform.

That is why we worked hard to cover their basic functions like object browsing, navigation, view filtering, paging support, and even advanced search feature which we believe we managed to improve over the original. Having content displayed, created, and edited properly, we dived deep into implementation of the actions available for folders, documents, and other standard and custom FileNet object classes (including Object Stores). Check in, Check out, Version History, and even Launch Workflow were reinvented with a brand new UI giving some more comfort and convenience to the end-user.

Dashboard

Eventually we were faced with the Dashboard task. There was no clear indication how it should look and work like, but we just knew we had to keep things going simple, easy to understand, and thus – easy to use. At the same time, we had to provide at least the same level of customization power to the end-user as it had been before with the Workplace XT dashboard interface. So we decided to start from there, and functionally recreated the same approach, however made it in a more clean and straightforward user interface so it is a pleasure to use it.

Workflow automation

In the scope of the project we also covered the Workflows area. In particular, we designed several screens:

1. Inbox - for end-users to see the tasks currently assigned directly upon them, to edit them, add/remove attachments, and after all save or complete them.
2. Queues (Public Inboxes) - for queue participants to see the queued tasks with the ability to reassign any to themselves.
3. Active Workflows - the list of active workflows user has participated in.
4. Task Tracker - for tracker-users, to review the entire step-history of tracked workflows with all parameters/associated data listed.

Settings

The application settings system supposes existence of three settings levels, each one has the corresponding priority:

• default settings – factory provided values;
• global settings (set up by the administrator) which could override the default ones;
• user settings - just a fraction of what is available in the global settings, and they could override some of the global ones.

Security

Security of the application consists of two parts:

• the application level functional permissions which regulate the subsystems users have access to. For example, some users could be prohibited of use of workflows (if they are supposed to stay in the Content section).
• the FileNet level security which controls user’s access to object stores, folders and documents, as well as Inbox and Public Inbox items available.

It is developed for large businesses and state or regional government institutions. A highly scalable system, it consists of a web application, a number of web services and a few Windows GUI applications. It provides:

• processing of thousands of documents electronically;
• cataloging and quick search features in document inventory;
• scanning with automatic upload of the paper documents;
• import of digitally signed documents from third parties certified by the government application for digital signing;
• generation of documents in PDF format;
• elaborate work-flow engine;
• email exchange of documents with similar systems;
• sophisticated security and logging mechanism.

A few Windows NT Services included in WFMS provide for “gateway interoperability” with other similar systems by automated electronic exchange of documents between different systems via email in accordance with government standards.

Workflow features include approving / rejecting / rework, documents versioning, check in / check out of documents and so on. There are document assignment and classification features which conform to government standards.

Security features are complex, roles and groups based. E.g. a document can be viewed by

• owner/creator;
• users with “view all” permission;
• users from departments that document is assigned to;
• users who are involved in “workflows” for document.

Documents can have attachments (any files with “description” and “number of pages” properties) and be “linked” with other documents.

Document in the system can be created in different ways and from different sources:

• uploaded in browser;
• from queue of received documents in “gateway”;
• from queue of scanned documents;
• so-called “icon substitutive” – for documents, which exist only on paper, but require to be registered too.

Documents can be either Internal or Incoming or Outgoing.

There are many features dealing with document registration, and assigning registration # and other registration attributes. Most of document properties can not be changed after document has been “officially registered” or “closed”, e.g. the document can not be checked out, new version can’t be created by check in, etc.

Any document has many mandatory properties (in accordance with government standards) whose values must be set by user on each stage of document’s “life cycle” – depending on document source and type.

Microsoft certified and recommended this system as a product that uses best industry programming practices for .NET.