Employee Benefits Content Authoring and Publishing

Situation

Harbinger's customer had been using a client/server application for employee benefits content authoring and publishing. As the usage of the product increased, customer started perceiving a need for scalability in this product.

Challenge

Making this application scalable was a major challenge. At any time, only single user could work on a specific benefits site. It was difficult to move the in-progress sites to other machines. The application used a thick client and did not have a clean rolebased access control over features. A scalable new product would help our customer do collaborative authoring and come up with benefits sites faster.

This being a mission critical application for our customer, Harbinger had to develop the new system and make it go live on a very tight timeline.

Harbinger Solution

Harbinger team studied the existing application in terms of functionality, usage and existing code-base. We proposed to re-architect the system and ported it to Web allowing usage anytime / anywhere. Different user interfaces were created for benefits experts, carrier companies and HR managers, providing only required functionality. The system supports content layering and deploys a separate Employee Resource Center for each company.

The application was re-architected as n-tier application. The Benefits object model contained business logic. It extracted data from the database layer and sent output information to presentation layer in the form of XML documents.

• N-tier architecture
• Access control and secure authentication
• JavaScript, XML documents
• API creation over business logic

Benefits

Customer was able to create more benefits sites within same time. User experience was enhanced. The Benefits object model layer also exposed a set of APIs to access benefits information without necessarily going through the portal provided by the presentation layer, thus allowing companies to embed benefits information within their own employee portals.