The Challenge

Best Vendors; a wholly owned subsidiary of Compass Group, provides vending services to companies that are looking for low-maintenance, highly profitable programs. Whether you have 5 locations or 5,000, they maintain all the details. They came to Magenic with a beta version of an ASP.NET business portal which they had developed internally. This portal was designed to provide data on usage statistics of vending machines around the country, but came with limitations. Needing a more robust application on a more current platform with a more intuitive interface, they engaged Magenic to achieve these ends.

Best Vendors needed to increase the administrative oversight of the incoming data and had a desire for something more visually intelligent. Silverlight application development presented a great fit in terms of functionality, but would be challenging as it is not supported by Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) for security purposes. Also, the new application would need to allow Best Vendors’ administrators to configure the site for individual customers.

The Solution

Magenic rebuilt the application from front to back, with a Silverlight application frontend and a Microsoft SQL Server backend for housing and managing the data. As a workaround to compatibility issues with WIF, Magenic implemented Silverlight as a restful service rather than using Microsoft SOAP standards. In doing so, Magenic also standardized the usage of WIF in more common practices than Best Vendors had been utilizing with its previous solution; this also made the new application Azureready.

Magenic also developed a single sign-on system that allows clients of Best Vendors to share users across applications. The solution makes it appear as though Best Vendor clients are instantly logged into the application by integrating with their personal login for their company networks. This eliminates a need for an additional login and password for clients and enhances the user experience by making access to the application more convenient.

The Result

Magenic’s solution was developed and deployed on-time and met the budgetary goals for the project. It also provided Best Vendors with the enhanced user experience and user interface they desired. Beyond that, the new solution featured vastly upgraded security. The application now leverages HTTPS and has several other security layers for a more robust means of securing data for Best Vendors clients.

The application is intuitive enough that business administration can be managed at the client level – meaning individual managers of stores can use the system with little to no training. Data can be granulized to down to statistics of individual machines within a store or broadened to cover an entire region of the country. The single signon feature is cloud-ready and provides an enhanced level of convenience. Magenic’s solution is expansive enough that it exceeded expectations and has been such a success that Best Vendors is expanding the usage of the application to its parent company.