A UK company operating mobile communications services in China needed a system to run all aspects of its business. Blueberry developed a sophisticated web-based system that overcame significant challenges in distributed database replication.
The Client
ChinaOneCall provides a 24/7 interpreter service to visitors to China.4 Developers, 2 Managers
6 man-months
SQL Server, ASP.NET
SQL Server replication
Screenshots
Login Screen
Michael Sinclair, Marketing Director of ChinaONEcall: “Blueberry has made the management system simple and intuitive to use.”
Call Centre
Call centre software allows operators to provide the phone interpreting service and debit the customer’s account accordingly.
Replication
Replication was an important requirement of the system as account information was needed within minutes by office staff in Kunming.
The Requirements
ChinaONEcall provides a 24/7 telephone link to professional interpreters fluent in English & Mandarin, allowing travellers to China with limited language skills to remove the formidable obstacle of communicating with taxi drivers, new business contacts, store assistants and so on. Access to the service only requires a mobile phone.
ChinaONEcall contacted Blueberry Consultants because they required a complete system to manage its business processes. In particular, they needed:
- A public website where customers can purchase credit and check their accounts.
- Call centre software which allows operators to provide the phone interpretation service and debit the customer’s account accordingly.
- A sophisticated web-based management system which allows maintenance of the system and supports resellers and sales agents.
What We Did
Blueberry completed the C1C Management System in 6 months using Microsoft's ASP.NET and SQL Server, with SQL Server replication to keep the public web-site (hosted in Hong Kong) in sync with the main system management server in Kunming, where the call centre staffed with expert English/Chinese interpreters is located.
Replication was an important requirement of the system, as uptodate account information was needed by staff in Kunming, delivered over a network that could experience considerable delays between the two locations.
A significant technical challenge in making this replication work was to eliminate problems caused by timeouts due to poor links, without restarting initialisation of the databases.
The Results
Blueberry solved this problem by performing a manual initialisation: Rather than allow the Kunming server to be responsible for the creation of the stored procedures which support replication, Blueberry removed them from the initialisation process, instead creating them manually at the Hong Kong server. This reduced the required up-time of the link from several hours to just minutes.