work stuff

Cool things are happening at work. My new boss (interim CIO, former Network Director) has just gone through my goals with me for the coming year (july ’05 – july ’06). In order to achieve mastery in my position I have to complete development on an Online Purchasing System for our company that interfaces with our General Ledger by Feb ’06. One tricky thing is that we don’t know what type of GL we’ll be using in Feb of ’06. Could be what we use now, could be something entirely different. hehe.

So. With that in mind, I’m about to set out on an adventure. I’m going to design and implement this program in under 9 months. It’s not something I can procrastinate on, either. This will take the full 9 months, I’m sure.

I know I rarely write about technical stuff in this blog, heck, I rarely update at all. But I’m going to try to make regular updates about this project. This is something I need to do for myself. I know some of you won’t care, and I might put it in livejournal cuts or something. Maybe I’ll even link to a different blog or something. I’m not sure.

So anyway, here’s my first update.

The project that prompted my hiring at ABS nearly 2 years ago has finally come to fruition. I have been tasked to build an Online Purchasing System for our company. We generate about 5000 purchase order requests a year. These are handled by one person. That comes out to roughly 20 each day. This poor lady (the controller) has to decide whether these requests should be approved or denied, or sent to higher authorities. If a request is approved, it becomes a full-fledged Purchase Order, carrying the promise of the company to pay the vendor.

There’s a bunch of rules used to determine which requests become PO’s and which go to higher authorities, and which authorities they go to. The application will need an engine to route these requests. The company bought BizTalk for this specific purpose, so that’s what I’ll be using as the engine. It specializes in this type of workflow process.

Built into BizTalk will be some sort of rules engine. I’ve only superficially looked at BizTalk, but I believe this will be handled there.

The PO requests will be created in some sort of web application. Our company is distributed all over the western hemisphere (Ok, just CONUS and Puerto Rico, but still) and we don’t want to mess with deploying applications. That platform will be ASP.NET and C#.

The data will be stored in SQL Server 2000. Although… this may be something to use SQL Server 2005 when it’s released… *thoughtfully scratches chin* I’ll definitely have to think about this one.

Another interesting piece of this solution will involve digital signatures. Each user will be authenticated to our Active Directory, and then they will have to *sign* the request with a digital signature. Because the PO becomes legally binding, there needs to be this measure of security.

So, I have to research using BizTalk as a workflow engine, and also find out how that works with digital signatures (BizTalk uses XML as its document format… how does that work with digital signatures?). Speaking of XML, maybe I could use InfoPath as the front-end, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about the GUI all that much. Certainly I wouldn’t have to worry about creating a GUI for the PO Request entry side of things. Heck, I may be able to use InfoPath to view the approved and rejected PO’s – that’d save me from having to create much of a GUI at all… I’m liking this more and more. Feb 2006 seems more and more doable…

Lots to research though. Should be fun. I’m reading up on writing specs – I definitely want to go into this with a plan, before I write any code. So I’m hitting up Joel On Software for my spec-writing needs. I gotta rough out a schedule too, before I get too far along.

This should be fun. I think.