4-page Case Study - Posted 12/3/2007

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Xerox Global Services

Xerox Cuts Development Time and Cost in Half, Boosts Scalability 500 Percent

Xerox analysts look to optimal software tools to provide optimal document outsourcing and service to clients. When the company needed a more scalable tool, Xerox built it using Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. Development took half the time and money that a Flash-based solution would have required. The tool delivers superb graphics and will help dramatically increase productivity and efficiency for Xerox and its services clients.

Business Needs

To help deliver Xerox services, the company’s analysts have used an Office Document Assessment Tool, which creates a comprehensive representation of a client’s technology environment and then helps them to analyze that environment. As client environments became larger and more complex, the five-year-old tool, with visual elements based on Microsoft® Office Visio® drawing and diagramming software, required additional scaling capabilities. It could take minutes to download small amounts of information from the central data repository to the Microsoft Office Access™ database software on an analyst’s portable computer. Downloading tables with more than 2,000 records caused delays.

Xerox needed a more powerful version of the Office Document Assessment Tool—and it needed it quickly. Because the company used Flash technology for a related application, it sought to create its new tool using Flash. With its ActionScript developer no longer on staff, Xerox needed to find a replacement.

“We spent two months looking for a Flash designer without success,” says Eugene Shustef, Feature Design Lead, Global Technology, Xerox. “We might have spent another four months and then hired someone who needed two months of training to be productive.”

Beyond that, the Flash component would require layers of code to integrate with the Xerox code base built on the Microsoft .NET Framework. That would lead to additional challenges and the expense of maintaining the extra code.

Solution

Shustef saw a demonstration of Windows® Presentation Foundation, a unified programming model in the Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5 for building rich, smart-client applications for the Windows operating system that deliver visually stunning user experiences.

“We made the decision to transition the development to Windows Presentation Foundation and the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team System products,” says Shustef. “Within two weeks, we had our prototype and were in a position to test the system.”

Thanks to Visual Studio Team System and the .NET Framework 3.5, we easily saved 50 percent of the time and money it would have taken to create the tool using Flash. Eugene Shustef Feature Design Lead, Global Technology, Xerox

The Windows Presentation Foundation designer in the Visual Studio® Team System 2008 development system was used to develop the presentation elements based on that design. The underlying application logic was created using component application blocks and a native .NET Framework–based, domain-specific language.

Web services enable the application to interact with the database, which was migrated from Office Access to Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Compact Edition database software. The developers wrote database queries natively in C# 3.0, rather than having to use specialized languages, thanks to the Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) support in .NET Framework 3.5.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server provided source control throughout the development process, as well as a way for developers and beta users to communicate about refinements to beta versions of the application.

The interface design was created by one developer, with three others creating the underlying application logic. Design began in June 2007, and the updated Office Document Assessment Tool, now dubbed the Optimization Tool, is scheduled to go into production by December 2007.

Benefits

“Thanks to Visual Studio Team System and the .NET Framework 3.5, we easily saved 50 percent of the time and money it would have taken to create the tool using Flash,” says Shustef. “That’s more than a savings to IT—it delivers a huge time-to-market advantage because it puts the tool into the hands of our analysts six months sooner than they would have had it otherwise.”

The intuitive nature of Windows Presentation Foundation, XAML, and the tools that support them—such as Expression Blend and the Windows Presentation Foundation designer—enabled Xerox to use rapid application development.

“Expression Blend and Windows Presentation Foundation deliver graphics as good as anything that’s available, and they’re much easier and quicker to use,” says Shustef. “We copy the XAML into Expression Blend and let it create the interface element, and then we use Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition to add the implementing action behind it. That’s a very powerful way to work. And our developers found all the technologies—from XAML to Expression Blend to Visual Studio to LINQ—to be just very cool.”

That combination of technologies also gave Shustef flexibility in staffing his development project. “With the Microsoft tools, the entire user interface was simplified,” says Shustef. “That’s a huge benefit to me as a manager because it means I can staff my projects more easily and cost-effectively; I don’t have to look for scarce, high-priced personnel. I also gain the ability to organize workflow in a way that makes sense for the project—implementing design and development sequentially or simultaneously, as I prefer.”

Xerox analysts are also getting what they need from the new tool—greater scalability, faster data handling, and easier use. Downloads that took hours are now accomplished in minutes; downloads that took minutes happen instantaneously. The solution is more than five times as scalable as before, supporting tables with tens of thousands of records without a problem.

The enhanced graphics make the solution faster and easier to use, as well as more attractive to users. As a result, Shustef expects users to generate millions of dollars per year in increased productivity.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 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 2008 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. Interaction between developers and designers is enhanced through the use of Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Expression® Studio. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information about Visual Studio 2008, go to:
www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio