Business Networking Application [CASE STUDY]

Based out of Canada, the Client is a business management and consultancy group bridging the gap between business and technology strategies with user needs across various industries like healthcare and telecommunications.

The goal of the client was to provide a platform to all SMEs and Consumers to collaborate and do business. They wanted a highly scalable, extensible and transparent platform/market place where businesses and consumers can not only do business but also socialize. The platform would allow businesses to showcase and promote their products/services and also allow consumers to look for recommended buyers.

To make his vision a reality, the client was in search of a reliable technology partner who would not only understand his vision but also help him to conceptualize, develop and implement his ideas. The online presence of the business networking software would create real and virtual communities of like minded people mutually benefitting each other. The need was to develop a user friendly website which can receive and deliver vast amounts of dynamic information to its audience and key members. Along with the intuitive interface, the client also wanted a web based database-driven administration tool that would allow in-house personnel to update content without actually going through the source code.

Rishabh Software, took the initiative of helping the customer by providing the consultation during the conceptualization phase of the business networking application by identifying the right kind of technology platform needed for development. Rishabh Software also helped the client in choosing the right hardware environment for hosting this application. Since the client was expecting 1.5 million registered members within a year, the application architecture was aligned with this business need. The technology team proposed to craft the solution on a LAMP platform and used MVC architecture based framework for better scalability, increased enhancements and ease of maintenance. The team suggested several unique features apart from the basic features to give separate identity from other social networking applications such as:

• Multiple profile using same ID,
• Provision to have members own meta tags for profile,
• Media streaming approach for dealing with media,
• Switching the profile, connections updates,
• Mass Messages tool to run email marketing campaigning
• Comprehensive searches for personal, businesses, services, products, answers etc
• SMS and email notification updates from connections on each event
• Business calendar, employee’s calendar, personal calendar, appointments / planner
• Business tools to design business cards, flyers, letterhead etc
• Detailed analytics reports for premium business members
• Comprehensive online shopping cart platform for businesses and personal members
• User groups and discussion board for group members
• Inviting contacts from different social networking address book like Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, Lycos and invite them to join. Beside that allows importing contacts from webmail address books such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook etc to invite contacts to join client business application

Client benefited from the customized business networking application as it became a destination site where members could visit for valuable information and share insights with other members. The application could support about 250,000 member profiles and 25,000 concurrent users with different user restrictions and social networking status.

• Server Operating System: Redhat Enterprise Linux
• Web Server: Apache 2.x
• Server side Scripting: PHP 5.x
• Database : MySQL 5.x
• Framework: CakePHP