Simple Search Content Management System

Simple Health & Beauty Limited
West Midlands, UK

Simple Health & Beauty Limited developed the Simple Search Content Management System (CMS) application for internal use by the intranet project team and Business Systems Department. This was a brand new application from the ground up. The database was written from scratch as was the query front-end, the dynamic indexer and the CMS.

The Simple Search home page.

The Simple Search CMS manages content and indexes for our company intranet. A user logs into the application using the Microsoft IIS integrated sign-in page. Next, he selects an option he wishes to update. Options include: dynamic entries, content categories, content subcategories, documents, and index entries. To add a new document, the user selects Documents from the menu and clicks the new button. Users specify a category, subcategory, description and title for each document and assign keywords to the intranet's index from this screen.

Adding a document folder to the Simple Search Content Management System.

Application size and scope

One Microsoft SQL Server database comprises eight tables and 25 web pages (including the CMS). The largest is the Actions table with 24,219 rows, an anonymous history of users' searches and system facilitated actions. The application has 55 to 60 users with five using the Iron Speed Designer portion of the application. An average of 375 simple searches with an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 page views are processed each month.

Cascaded into a directory

The project

From start to finish, the project took our five person team approximately three months to implement. One developer completed the Iron Speed Designer portion of the application in three hours!

Code extensions and customizations

We applied 15 lines of custom code to the Microsoft IIS Active Directory Sign-in pages in Simple Search CMS application. It took us one hour (including testing time) to apply these changes.

No third-party components were needed for successful implementation of the Simple Search CMS application.

Page layout customizations

Only a handful of layout customizations for validation were made. We used a standard Kilimanjaro page style in Iron Speed Designer.

Iron Speed Designer impact

We saved three and a half months of development time using Iron Speed Designer. If we had bought the product earlier we could have used the application classes for the Intranet front end and indexer development too. This would have probably saved us another fortnight.

It's difficult to say how much development cost was saved as we would have had to take a different approach without Iron Speed Designer, but we probably saved upwards of £7000. At least six months would be required for this project had we not used Iron Speed Designer.

Without Iron Speed Designer the project would have cost significantly more, both in time and money.

Next steps

Currently, there are no plans to extend the application but some functionality may be added to the client user interface in the future. The Simple Search CMS application provides all of the functionality that we need for now. As new users join the company, they are automatically configured to use the Simple Search platform.

About the developer

William Eastbury left school at 16 to concentrate on a career in IT. He had other vocational qualifications and is currently studying part-time with Open University for the last year of a Bachelor of Arts degree.

William has been developing with Visual Basic since version 3.0 for over 10 years. He is currently focusing on .NET based technologies and VB.NET along with modern application development techniques and ASP.NET. He is also experienced in SQL Server DBA having used the product since Version 6.5.