NetPlus making it "Eazy" The Company
The Durkan Group is a construction, investment, housing, interiors and property company, with main offices based in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire. The Group encompasses four member companies and has a turnover of approximately €130 million.
Patrick McGowan, Durkan's IT Manager, built their first database in the early 90's using DataEase 4.53: EZbuild (pronounced EasyBuild), an integrated accounting system for Durkan's construction business. It also handled the management of consultants, suppliers, subcontractor and clients (accounts payable/receivable), payroll for monthly and weekly paid employees, job-costing, nominal ledger, cash-book, VAT and PAYE returns, BACS and cheque printing. It had approximately 250 forms and 750 DQL procedures.
The Challenge
Although the Durkan Group had been successfully using this comprehensive system for the past six years, in recent years, other departments such as Marketing and Personnel were demanding increased access to EZbuild's data but in a Windows interface. This, together with a rapidly growing user count and sheer size of the database meant that some radical changes needed to be made to the system as a whole, but without re-inventing the wheel or causing massive business disruption.
The Solution
Durkan decided to move this application to a client server environment, so the data was transferred out of "native" DataEase into an Oracle 7 database. The users did not see any difference as DataEase SQL Connect was used to link DataEase 4.53 to the Oracle tables.
Around this time, NetPlus had just been launched and Patrick saw this as the Windows development environment that he had been looking for - carrying forward familiar DataEase functionality, but providing complete control via object properties and ScaleScript methods. Previously Patrick had evaluated a number of other development tools including VB and Delphi but none offered these unique features of NetPlus.
He decided that any Windows development would be done side by side with the existing DOS system. This ensured that the business applications stayed up and running and would provide two alternative "views" of the same data, one from DataEase DOS, the other via the new NetPlus application that was being built as a total "Corporate Database" application but using the same underlying EZbuild tables.
Sapphire handled the migration of data to Oracle and produced the first NetPlus forms and a prototype application.
Since then, Patrick has gradually developed the rest of the application, "EZbuild for Windows", with a wide range of additional functionality - comprehensive contact management, personnel management and project CVR management to name a few.
The application has used NetPlus from version 2.75 through to 3.5. Oracle was also upgraded to 8.16 (8i). It is accessed by 120 networked PCs using Windows 2000 with browser access also provided.
The design topology for the completed application has shifted a few times, most recently to include ActiveX support for the latest version of Crystal Reports. This allows the user to not only preview and print their reports to any network printer, but also to export the data to Excel, Word and many other popular formats.
The outcome
Patrick quotes: "NetPlus is a very powerful product. To be able to install NetPlus, point it to any SQL database such as Oracle or MS SQL Server and create a logical model of that database, then create a working form with scrollable data is quite clever. The hard bit however is understanding SQL databases in the first place and the form design and the tweaking of ScaleScript code. But these are issues that affect any Windows development tool and I would rather re-use long ago learned DataEase methods than be writing miles of VB code!"
Patrick has now commissioned help from Sapphire to set up WebServer Tools, the Web Server component of NetPlus, to deliver database capability to remote building sites via the Web. He concludes:
"This combination of NetPlus/Oracle/Crystal/Web is a pretty serious alliance and probably about as "cutting edge" as it gets!"