TeamPulse is an agile project management tool developed by Telerik. The xView project was initiated to provide users with a new set of cross project views that could be accessed from clients that didn’t support Silverlight. Our UI had to be as fast and attractive as our existing Silverlight UI.
Challenges and Objectives
Our goal was to take much of our existing data (along with it’s supporting backend code) and build a rich HTML 5 based UI. We didn’t want to have to totally re-invent the bulk of our application or have our developers have to learn a massive new framework. Just working and working with very little friction was one of our main development goals.
Additionally, we were hoping to not have to build a lot of UI infrastructure. Our UI needs weren’t simple, but we hoped that many of the UI features we wanted to implement we would just get for free and not have to build (and then have to support) a lot of code.
Solution
Based on our affiliation with the Kendo UI team, it was a natural place to start, but to be perfectly clear; we were not obliged to use their controls. In the past, we’ve made conscious decisions to not use other Telerik product just because they exist and because they were very early in their product cycle, we were a little cautious.
In the end, we were fans of the controls.
Here’s a list of controls that we’ve made use of to date.
- Chartview
- Combobox
- Dropdown List
- Datasource
- Grid
- Numeric Textbox
- Panel Bar
- Treeview
Results
Fortunately for the TeamPulse team, the controls were more then up to the task. After only a few days, our developers were commenting on just how easy the controls were to use.
As with any product that’s early in it’s development cycle, we discovered a few minor issues with the controls. But as is expected with Telerik, their support was first class. We were provided with internal builds that address our issues, usually within a day or two.
The xView features were rolled out in February 2012. The entire development was completed in less than 10 weeks and consumed less than ½ of our development effort over that time, making this one of our most cost effective new feature sets. The feature has been very well received by our user community and we’re planning on adding new features in the upcoming months, all built with the Kendo controls and making use of some of the new features in their latest March 2012 release.
Try TeamPulse
xView Screenshots: