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Monday, July 27, 2009

Customers Versus Prospects

The shift I’m working on right now is the ability to capture prospects in the system, rather than capturing every party interested in our services as customers.  This project will take about one week to implement (should be testing this Friday). 

Have I mentioned that I love TDD and .Net?

A prospect is defined as the following:

  • Not paying us (yet!)
  • Not on a contract
  • Not required to give us a ton of information
  • Interested in our services

Goals and Requirements

The system should allow users (both a prospect themselves, or our staff members) enter basic contact information to be used when following up with service information.  The data should be validated and stored in the DB.  We will also capture referral information for later-implemented promotions.

Key Service Components

The system will be similar to previous roll-outs, using WCF hosted in IIS as the transport for all service contracts.  SQL Server will be the backend data store and ASP.Net will be used for the public-facing side of the application.  WPF will be used internally to monitor the queue of service information requests and process prospects converting them to customers.  Conversion rates will be reported through an internal ASP.Net app with the SQL Reporting engine. 

Security for all non-public components will be configured via existing application groups in Active Directory.  Only the ASP.Net server will be out in the DMZ, with all other components living on the internal network and secured via IPSec and routing equipment.

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