Computer Information System Migration

Client Overview
The client is the Hong Kong division of an intellectual property agency, which established with the official approval of the Government of the People's Republic of China, to provide legal services in the areas of patent, trademark and copyright for overseas clients.

Why USE
The client chose USE because we're an outsourcing company which passes CMMi5 level certification, which can prove our development and management capability. We have mature development processes and experience to guarantee the success of delivery.

Project Overview
It has been years since the CIS (Computer Information System) built with Power Builder 6.0 was put into practice with this client. This system dealt with Registration, External/Internal Patent, Trademark, Accounting and Billing.

However, with the business development, more and more new business requirements appeared and were added to the existing system, which made the system perform slower and raised the maintenance cost as time passed.

The client wanted the system be migrated from Windows 98 to Vista system, and also database be upgraded from SQL Server 6.5 to 2005.

An important requirement that the client wanted in the new system was the ability to synchronize data amongst different divisions.

USE's Role
USE took complete responsibility for the development of all aspects of this system. This involved requirements analysis, design, coding, testing, and successfully deploying the system on to the Server.

Approach
Due to the large scale of the system, iterative development method was adopted.
Data from different divisions were separated on old systems, in order to share them among different divisions, we added an intermediate application server to deal with data from different places. In this way, once data is modified by division A, division B can see the changes at once. Once an error occurs, the intermediate server will throw the error and stop distributing data immediately. 

Challenge
The team lacked of knowledge on patent and didn't have much experience in Power Builder. To resolve the language problem, USE hired an expert to give 2-week training to the team. In order to catch up on business knowledge, the key team players were sent to the client site to get online trainings from the client whom they documented afterwards.

Efforts
240 man-months

The Benefits

• The new system is flexible and easy to expand and maintain;
• Data can be shared and synchronized among different divisions, data errors are reduced as well;
• Performance of the system is improved, maintenance cost is reduced.