Our customer provides an end-to-end Enterprise Business Management solution for medium to large law firms and professional services organizations. 80% of 200 law firms use our customer’s solutions to operate their businesses efficiently.
Our customer has several concurrent development projects, across their global offices, ranging from legacy client-server applications to the best-of-breed enterprise web-applications. The only common thread for all these projects was that they used Visual Studio for code development, not necessarily the same versions. They used different systems for source control and versioning (SourceSafe and StarTeam), project management (MS Project), document management (SharePoint and Wikis), issue-tracking (Pivotal, and StarTeam) and CRM (Pivotal and CRM On-Demand) that did not integrate well with each other and created bottlenecks for release management and customer support. In 2012, it was decided to unify all these applications on Microsoft's Team Foundation Server to leverage its end-to-end application lifecycle management capabilities and reduce the number of systems to two - TFS and CRMOD. However, the project was complex given different processes, technology platforms and maintenance needs of their various products.
As we had helped develop several of the software products, we were acutely aware of the differences, that had the potential to derail the rollout of TFS. We worked closely with the different departments to establish a baseline for TFS collections, templates and forms and customization processes to enable product specific needs, in their own collections. Once the strategy approval was achieved, migrations were repeatedly tested to ensure that final migration would be problem-free. Initially, the database was setup with Courses, Terms, Faculty and other information. Division could easily upload data and this avoided manual data entry. After streamlining its processes for online information collection, the Division felt comfortable that Department Logistics would deliver the enhancement in productivity as well as accuracy. In-school’s Department Logistics also easily absorbed need to change the database and made the start of the quarter rush smooth, so that the Division could handle dispensing accurate information at the start of the term.
Over the course of the established project plan, In-school was able to accomplish the following milestones: Configured and tested the TFS 2013 multi-tier environment. Planned, organized and executed the migration of product based source control with full revision histories and issue management to corresponding TFS Collections. Automated build processes for developer initiated incremental builds and QA initiated full-release builds. Expanded the build automation processes to include integration and smoke tests with accurate reports. Integrated CRMOD with TFS to provide full visibility of bugfix schedules and release to the customer support organization. In-school personnel were contracted long term to manage and administer the TFS farm If you'd like to hire our experienced software professionals, or want to outsource software development services to us, please feel free to get in touch with our expert team at sales@in-school.net.