FileHold Systems
FileHold Systems brings developers together with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
|
|
Company Overview
In 2004, four entrepreneurs based in Vancouver, British Columbia became business partners and founded a new company - FileHold Systems. The new company’s mission was to provide businesses with document and record lifecycle software designed to help them manage documents from creation to disposal. Its flagship solution is known today as FileHold ‘06.
Business Challenge
“We saw a market need for software that would help midsize companies and departments of big organizations cope with large volumes of documents by converting them into an electronic format, and making them quickly and easily accessible to employees,” says Jacek Lipowski, CTO, FileHold Systems.
As a startup, the partners had to personally fund creation of the FileHold solution. In order to be successful, they needed to design and build their document management solution as quickly and efficiently as possible.
To help keep costs down, the founders established a development team in Poland. This meant FileHold Systems would employ two teams of developers working nine time zones apart, and speaking two different languages. Despite this, tight integration between the groups was critical. The two teams also needed a central repository where they could easily collaborate on the project, store their daily builds, and share updates in a way that everyone working on the solution would be aware of the status of the product at all times.
Timing was critical. The business partners would see no revenue until the product was released, and the pressure on the development team to report progress was intense.
FileHold Systems realized that it needed an end-to-end solution to help its development teams maximize collaboration and productivity, and drive faster development times.
“We were all familiar with the challenges that arise during the course of a software project. Often they’re a result of an inability of developers to work effectively as a team, or to communicate updates and make revisions to code. Making sure everyone is up to date and working on the same version can be a big drain on time and resources, and we needed to avoid that,” says Lipowski.
|
Solution
In order to deploy quickly in the target market of medium sized companies, FileHold ’06 needed to leverage a familiar and standardized operating platform. For this reason, FileHold chose to base the solution on Microsoft .NET-connected software, including Windows® 2003 Server operating system and Microsoft SQL Server™.
To allow for maximum flexibility, scalability and performance, FileHold also decided to pursue a service oriented architecture approach and chose .NET Framework 2.0 as it’s foundation even though their background was in Java and other web technologies.
FileHold Systems chose Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 Team System and Team Foundation Server as their software development environment. Together, the tools are designed to help developers to quickly and easily build software products and customizable solutions on a secure, collaborative platform.
“We had experience with other software development frameworks available on the market. But we found that they lacked in the area of productivity, and couldn’t provide team integration and collaboration we needed,” says Lipowski.
FileHold was impressed by Visual Studio Team System. “Even when it was still in beta, we were very impressed by Visual Studio 2005 Team System. It had all the features and requirements we needed. I have worked with many integrated development environments and software life cycle platforms before, but none of them matched Visual Studio Team System’s productivity in the area of project collaboration, coding, testing and overall project management,” says Lipowski.
FileHold Systems took advantage of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, which it installed in Poland, as a central repository to store all code updates, team communication and project documentation. Developers, testers, product manager, project manager and development manager were equipped with the appropriate Team System roles by using Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers, Team Edition for Software Testers and Team Explorers.
Because FileHold’06 would be based on the newly released .NET Framework 2.0 platform, the ability to conduct thorough testing was of paramount importance to developers. They took advantage of the integrated quality assurance features of Visual Studio 2005 Team System to help them perform fast and accurate unit testing, as well as test for security and performance, load testing, from within the integrated developer and testing environments.
“Efficient unit testing, web testing and load and performance testing were key to achieve the quality we wanted from our solution, and the Microsoft product offered us all of this. This made our decision to go with Team System even easier,” adds Lipowski.
Leveraging ASP.NET 2.0 helped FileHold developers to build interactive and user-friendly. Web-based interfaces - and build them faster then ever before.
The company also took advantage of SharePoint® Portal Server technology, made available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, to boost team collaboration. Developers created a customized project portal to provide the two teams with quick and easy access to product development and quality assurance updates, meeting agendas and minutes, and various discussion boards and to-do lists. Project libraries were also posted to the portal to provide a project documentation repository for architecture, design, quality assurance, deployment and project management documents.
FileHold could not afford to devote large amounts of time to training. But developers were able to get up to speed quickly with the new Microsoft tools. They were particularly impressed by the learning and support resources available to Microsoft developers through the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), a broad information service that offers a range of resources, documentation, seminars and access to user communities.
“Anytime we had a question or issue, MSDN helped us get the answers we need fast, which is something we appreciated, given our tight time and budget,” adds Lipowski.
Business Benefits
Taking advantage of Microsoft-based developer software helped FileHold Systems release FileHold’06 on time and within budget. FileHold’s founders call the entire journey a great success.
“In the end choosing Microsoft technologies was a very good decision, because it yielded the results we wanted. Visual Studio Team System was the main reason we were able to develop our product so quickly, and meet all of our objectives,” says Lipowski.
Increased Productivity
FileHold Systems needed to develop FileHold’06 as efficiently as possible and maximize the productivity of each developer.
Using Visual Studio 2005 Team System helped to make FileHold developers extremely productive. Over the course of the project developers took advantage of numerous time-saving features, such as class modeling, unit test support, web test recording, and performance and load testing facilities. Automated builds were seamlessly integrated with bug reporting and tracking, enabling developers to spend more time on core tasks.
“The productivity savings and productivity improvements we realized were directly related to the Visual Studio 2005 development system. From my experience we saw a 30 per cent improvement in productivity from what we’ve seen on other platforms,” says Lipowski.
Improved Collaboration
Using Microsoft development tools, FileHold Systems was able to maintain a high level of collaboration between two groups of developers in two different countries, helping them to successfully create an entirely new business tool.
“We chose Team Foundation Server because of its strong collaboration features. Establishing a portal where all stages of the project are stored so that everyone can access what they want, when they need it, helped us to work better together and stay on track,” says Lipowski.
Had FileHold Systems not used Team Foundation Server, developers would have to track all the steps of development through email, increasing the risks of delays or missteps, and slowing communications.
“We’ve all worked with tools that require teams to send endless emails between developers in order to build an application. It’s overwhelming and completely inefficient. With Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team System we don’t have to worry about emails, conference calls or live status meetings. Each morning the team can review the status of all the components, and get a real-time view of the ‘pulse’ of the project. I cannot imagine undertaking our product development initiative in the geographically distributed development scenario faced without Visual Studio Team System. The magnitude of our savings, resulting from the fact that we were able to successfully execute our new development model, is in the range of several hundred thousand dollars,” says Lipowski.
Superior Software
FileHold Systems had limited resources with which to build FileHold’06 and also limited time to produce the product and start selling it. The company credits the decision to go with Microsoft developer tools as the reason for creating the solution on time and on budget.
“Normally, software projects run and cost 50 per cent more than initially planned. In our case, we were on budget, yes our initial budget, and on time. It was unprecedented in my career. You can only do those things using the right tools.” says Lipowski.
By using Microsoft technology FileHold Systems was able to create a superior solution.
“Customer acceptance of FileHold’06 has been very high. It is a credit to our development team and Microsoft tools and .NET platform that we have such a stable product. We are ready to add new features to our product, and are extremely confident that we can maintain the high level of productivity and efficiency we have to date.”
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
For more information about Visual Studio 2005, go to: msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about FileHold Systems Inc. products and services, call (604) 734-5653 or visit the Web site at: http://www.filehold.com/
