“This is a really important project for the business and as usual you’ve pulled out all the stops to make it happen. This kind of responsiveness from suppliers is extremely refreshing.”
S. Brameld, IT Director
Nebulas
A customer portal that integrates Nebulas product offerings into a single user interface.
How we help Nebulas
The Background
After the success of a recent software project, Nebulas approached First Option Software to create a brand new Web Portal for their customers. The brief was to provide a focal point of interaction for customer services, increase customer loyalty and add further differentiation from Nebulas’ competitors.
Futureproof Design
New functionality can easily be added in the future by extending the functionality within each widget and adding new widgets.
In talking to Nebulas, it was clear that the portal should be interactive, should be be able to cater for a number of different customer types and be extensible. Further to this, the portal should be customisable by the user, allowing them to see their preferred information.
The solution was to create a design based around flexible widgets with each widget providing a distinct function and able to be personalised to the viewer’s preference. Each widget can be provisioned at a company and user level allowing for certain features, such as raising change requests, to be accessible based on purchased services. This design provides great flexibility for adding further widgets and value-add services in the future.
Completely Flexible
The user can personalise the widget layout by dragging and dropping the widgets into their preferred position.
Systems Integration
The widgets use a variety of techniques to retrieve and submit data into different management systems.
The initial widgets are integrated with five different back-end systems providing customers with a live, holistic view of the services supplied to them by Nebulas. An important feature of the portal was to provide this functionality without adding extra workload to Nebulas’ staff so the integration was key to this.
Widget types include:
- Add/View Support Ticket
- Add/View Change Requests
- Reporting
- Monitoring
- Documentation
- Contact and Useful Information
- Purchases
TECHNOLOGIES USED:
HTML, Ajax, XML, PostgreSQL, Web Services, MS CRM
Following the initial launch of the portal, Nebulas are already planning new widgets to further benefit their customers.
Branded as nPortal, Nebulas see it as a key strategic tool for future business to help their customers manage their network security infrastructures and acts as a significant value-add to the services that they provide.
