Case Study: GWA Wines

GWA Wines was first introduced in the New Riders prep book for the 70-100 exam. At that time, a small ASP application was created for it. In this chapter, you revisit GWA, as it appears that it might need to upgrade to a .NET solution.

Background

GWA Wines (GWA stands for "Goes With Anything") has been producing and selling fine wines out of Portland, Oregon for more than 50 years. Its first growth spurt happened after being honored as one of the "Top 50" vineyards in America by a prestigious magazine. This growth propelled GWA from a local vineyard to a national distributor, and now it has plans to go international.

A few years ago, a "classic" Active Server Pages (ASP) Web application was built for GWA Wines to help its marketing and name-recognition efforts. With its recent international expansion plans, GWA Wines wants to expand its Web presence and add new features. A .NET solution seems the logical choice.

GWA has a small wine and souvenir shop in Portland, but the main sales focus is through various distribution channels to stores throughout the United States (and now into other countries).

Problem Statement

GWA would like the new solution to focus on the following three areas:

• The field sales force of 50 people often travel and have to rely on small, handheld PCs, yet they need updated access to the GWA inventory and customer databases.

• The original system was not built to accommodate the expected traffic increase through the Web site, nor does it offer online purchases. Originally, GWA was not concerned with short downtime situations. However, the Web site needs to be up all the time now. Uptime is even more important now that GWA intends to service countries in other time zones.

• GWA needs to integrate its Web presence more tightly with the home office staff. Inventory, pricing, client lists, invoicing, and the "What wine goes best with chicken?" forum all require sophisticated and responsive screens for the people administering the Web site. The home office staff needs to be able to make changes to confidential information, so their usage patterns of the new solution will be quite different from those of the sales staff or the e-commerce users.

Current System

GWA currently has a Distributed interNet Applications (DNA)based, ASP application built in the late 1990s; at that time, GWA still stored data on an AS/400 in DB2 tables. Since that time, the entire data storage has been moved to an existing SQL Server 6.5 database server that was already servicing the inventory system. This move made it easier to migrate to using ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) for the data access strategy and to retire the mainframe hardware.

The current Web interface runs on a single Internet Information Services (IIS) server talking to a single application server. Failover is done manually. To date, volume has not been an issue for this physical configuration, as the system has been limited to static content and a "store locator" service.

Owner

"We currently have a small Web setup because most of our internal activity has centered on other systems. We sell through actual stores, and our sales staff uses disconnected laptops to manage their contact information and 'sync up' when they get back to Portland. This no longer works, however. Last year, two separate salespeople both committed our entire stock of 1996 Merlot to two separate distributors. It took us weeks, and a lot of money, to clean that mess up."

Envisioned System

GWA wants a high-availability, e-commerce Web system that allows customers around the world to purchase its products directly. It also wants the sales force to be able to access corporate databases (securely, of course) from anywhere in the world by using handheld wireless PCs.

Additionally, future releases of the Web site should be able to interact with users in their native languages and currencies.

Owner

"Our long-term goal is to allow customers from anywhere in the world to log in to our Web site in their own language and order wine, paying with currency from their country. If it means upgrading our Web hardware or server software, then so be it. We don't currently have the business staff to support this goal, but we want to keep it in mind as we design."

Sales Manager

"We spec'ed out the original system as having minimal uptime requirements. However, now that we plan to actually sell wine through our Web site, we need to provide round-the-clock availability. If someone in Moscow wants to buy a case of our 1980 Cabernet Sauvignon at 2:00 a.m. Portland time, we want to sell it to them."

IT Manager

"After our last upgrade to SQL Server 6.5, we let all but one of our programmers go. Wine sales were still good, but we couldn't justify additional work on our Web site. It was just a high-priced billboard for us. Now sales wants us to become a full-fledged e-commerce site. I have to locate six employees or contractors quickly to get this .NET solution up and running. All the banners in the corporate hallways say 'We will sell wineit's time!' I've been told it would be a good idea to have the new solution running in less than three months. Gosh, it's all or nothing around here!

I understand that there are two architects who work with wine distributors as a specialty. The only problem is that they reside in Chicago, 2,000 miles away. If I can figure out how to set it up so they can interact with four other developers from this area (or up north near Seattle), I'll be pleased. I guess we'll choose a .NET language based on the background of the majority of developers I can locate."