Project Overview
ClaroConnect is a free, unbiased search tool to match the user personal needs to find the right financial advisor, certified financial planner (CFP) or investment advisor. It was started with one thing in mind – to help people make the best connection to financial professionals who match their needs. ClaroConnect search engine offers individuals an unbiased way to search for help, and its profiles offer professionals a way to connect with the target clients they are looking for.
ClaroConnect is more than a simple directory; it allows the user to search for the required expertise, to search in the directory the user has to go through two steps, in the first step the user should select the type of service(s) he/she is looking for and in the second step the user has to specify the Location, Experience, Qualifications, Language and even custom searching criteria that the user can specify.
Challenges
- ClaroConnect’s content is the most important thing in the project and in order to expose it to the user we had to come up with as much intuitive design and easy to use features, the site of the objects in each page and the way it is distributed is minimizing the time the user is taking to find what he/she is looking for also behind the seen the application is using a highly designed data retrieval and management query to maximize the efficiency of the application and reduces the user waiting time.
- The application had to be designed and developed having in mind the huge amount of data that it could have over time especially the education library and the articles section, InspirationGate decided to build a small but reliable and highly responsive CMS that match our customer needs.
- This project was developed in very critical time during the economical recession, which imposed budget and timeline constraints, InspirationGate successfully developed and delivered the solution on budget and on time.
Provided Solution
ClaroConnect is a multi layers application, each layer in the system is placed in a way the maximize the use of its functionality and all the layers are interacting with each other in a way that increases the usability of the developed components.
The fist layer from the ground up is the data providing layer, this layer contains two components the database and the data access layer, the database is implemented using SQL Server 2005 and it is used to save all the site content, the second part of this layer is the data access components; these components are generated using a specially designed code generation template, the main goal we achieved from designing this layer is to increase the efficiency of the communication with the database by reducing the dynamically generated code in the runtime.
The second main layer in the application is the data object layer; this is a vertical layer responsible to provide the appropriate data structures that present the business objects inside the application.
Also there are a number of other vertical layers in the application like security and exception handling and logging, these are an infrastructure layers in the system used to secure the application as well as handling the exceptions that could occur.
The business logic layer is the centralized place where the entire application logic is implemented, it also has small caching component used to hold some of the rarely changing data; this data is shared between all the site users.
Finally the application has a web based presentation layer, the application customers are using different browsers like FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari this is why we developed this layer to be cross browser compatible.
Technologies
Visual Studio 2005, .NET 2.0, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server 2005