The Booth Company develops and administers "360 Degree" Feedback Surveys for executives and managers of Fortune 500 corporations. The company applies statistical validation on over 150 million responses and a comprehensive battery of measurements on key management skills. Founded in 1972, Booth is an established leader in customized 360 Degree survey development, human resources consulting and training.
The company had developed a custom report application and graphic user interface in Visual FoxPro to manage its growing volume of reports. The application was integrated with their website to provide clients with online access to their survey results in print and electronic formats.
The aging system was limited by its error handling abilities and the report designs and formats it could support. The company's website, developed in ASP and VBScript, presented system integration issues and made modifications to the Web application difficult since it required reconstruction of the entire Web page for any changes to the application.
The Booth Company retained Amadeus Consulting to develop a new and improved Web-based system for report generation and distribution. The .NET Framework was the obvious choice to replace ASP for its ability to separate the presentation and application layers, decoupling the user interface from the business logic making modifications to either much easier. This also gave Booth far greater freedom and flexibility in the design and formatting of their survey reports.
The old application's report generator would stop upon encountering any errors and required user intervention to resolve and restart. For the new system, Amadeus Consulting developed a Windows Service which ran in the background and continued responding to new requests and generating reports while errors were logged, batched and reported.
In designing the system, we reverse-engineered the old application to replicate and enhance all of the existing functionality. Crystal Reports was utilized for report generation and to replicate the original Microsoft Word-based reports, stretching Crystal Reports to the limits of its capabilities. The final Report Processing Engine is very error-resilient and handles multiple format and distribution options including export to PDF format.
After completing the overhaul of the report generation system, Amadeus Consulting worked with Booth to modernize the Web-based survey system that was the input to their reporting system. The Amadeus Consulting development team worked closely on site with Booth's graphic design team in providing a state-of-the-art survey interface that worked in conjunction with the new report delivery system, the legacy FoxPro data maintenance system, and the centralized SQL database. The survey site utilized the Amadeus Consulting .NET Core Components to provide the Booth design team with HTML templates that they could use to modify the look and feel of the entire site without the involvement of the development team.
Once the survey and report generation was modernized, Booth wanted a portal system for end users who were taking part in self evaluations and receiving the 360 degree feedback reports. Amadeus Consulting developed this portal as an ASP.NET Website, again relying on the Amadeus Consulting Core Components to provide the Booth design team the flexibility to modify the UI. The portal allowed users a central place to take the surveys, keep track of the number of responses from supervisors, peers, and direct reports, as well as receive their feedback reports.
The portal includes a new Questions Library Database which supports many different question forms and dynamically links surveys to the questions database via "Survey Mapping" so that surveys with modified or derivative questions are mapped to the original survey question. This enables reporting and analysis to join similar question records and automatically adjust responses for uniform comparison. Survey objects are decoupled from their presentation format, leveraging the advanced capabilities of the .NET Framework. This enables surveys to be easily deployed on multiple platforms including Web; print; PDA; and off-line surveys, enabled by a browser plug-in using X-Forms technology.