Background
Northwind Traders operates retail stores in 16
countries worldwide. The company sells a wide variety of furniture, dining and
kitchen goods, bath end bedding accessories and other speciality items for the
home. Products are delivered to retail stores from regional distribution
centres.
The company plans to offer its products in an online store, which will also be
serviced by the regional distribution centres. The company contracts you to
design and implement a Microsoft .NET solution architecture for the online
store.
The new online services will be made available in three cities in a pilot
implementation. If the pilot is successful, the company will deploy the online
store worldwide over the next 13 months. The worldwide deployment must be
completed without any additional development effort.
Existing
IT Environment
The existing corporate network includes both
Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 computers and Windows 2000 Server computers in
a single domain. Employees use desktop computers that run Windows XP Professional
and Microsoft Office XP. The human resources department has its own intranet,
which uses Internet Information Services (IIS) and Microsoft SQL Server 2000.
Product inventory functions are currently performed by a mainframe computer.
Users connect to the mainframe computer by using terminal emulation software on
their desktop computers.
The regional distribution centres are connected to the main office by a
dedicated T1 frame relay link. Every night, the distribution centres update the
inventory data on the mainframe computer.
Interviews
IT Department
IT Manager
I manage a staff of 50 trained technicians who are
located around the world. We employ two technicians at the main office in each
country where we do business. The technicians spend most of their time
troubleshooting computers that stop responding. We want a replacement for the
terminal emulation software that we currently use. The new software should
still permit us to use the mainframe computer to print reports. It should also
provide secure access to the mainframe computer from the Internet. The
development and deployment of the mainframe solutions should occur during the
pilot implementation of the online store.
Lead Developer
Five developers work on my staff. They are
responsible for maintaining an inventory management application on the
mainframe computer. They also maintain the human resources intranet. They are
proficient in Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) and ASP. They
can also use several mainframe development languages.
Finance Department
Chief Financial Officer
We want to be able to update product information
more frequently. Currently, updating the product information from our vendors
is a time-consuming process. Replacing this process is essential if we want to remain
competitive in the marketplace. We will continue to perform inventory reporting
from the mainframe computer.
Business Stakeholders
Business Manager
As a global company, we have some unique
challenges. We must be able to present our online store in a way that is
appropriate to each locale in which it is viewed. In particular, we need to
display currencies and calendars in the format that is most familiar in each
locale.
Currently, we use an international company to perform credit card verification
for our retail stores. We want to use the same company’s XML Web Service
to perform verification for our new online store. One key goal is to protect
the confidentiality of credit card information during online transactions.
Marketing manager
Currently, we analyze customer spending by
examining paper reports that are generated each month by the mainframe
computer. These reports provide limited data and we cannot perform any
additional analysis of the data. Our online store will require us to analyze
data that relates to virtual shopping carts. Analyses must be performed several
times each month in a variety of ways, such as by customers, by promotion, by
geographical location and by time period.
Users
Inventory Manager
The terminal emulation software is slow and
difficult to use. It often causes our computers to stop responding. In
addition, we need to remember several different user names and passwords to
access our desktop computers and to use the mainframe computer. This
requirement is difficult and frustrating.
Business
Process
Northwind Traders obtains products from 15
different vendors. Once a month, a magnetic tape is sent by each of the vendors
to the main office of Northwind Traders. These tapes are used to update the
product data in the mainframe computer. The tapes include data relating to new
products and discontinued products. They also include pricing changes for
existing products. Each tape provides product names and descriptions in several
different languages. Each vendor uses a different format for the data on tape.