MAG Softwrx

Company: MAG Softwrx Project website: http://demo.magsoftwrx.com Industry: Technology and Software Products used: RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX

In 1996, MAG Softwrx was founded by an information technology consultant who was tired of the time tracking software available on the market. The software available wasn't flexible, it didn't allow users to track time the way they do business, and users couldn't generate reports on the information most relevant to them. As a software developer, he wanted software that offered flexibility while ensuring he got paid for all work performed. He wanted detailed time tracking and the ability to provide accurate estimates. No software on the market did that, so he developed Timeless Time & Expense. He launched the first version of Timeless Time & Expense in 1997.

In 2002, in response to customers demand, the company launched the enterprise version of Timeless Time & Expense. This version allows users to share tasks and report on multiple users, allowing flexibility for multiple users and for project managers overseeing larger projects.

MAG Softwrx offers the Personal version for individuals and the Enterprise version for tracking an entire team or company. Over 1500 companies now use Timeless Time & Expense in 45 countries.

One of the main benefits of Timeless Time & Expense is that it is easy to track detailed projects. Though we offered a superior product for the desktop, we recognized the need for a web version years ago. Our objective was to provide the same product and ease of use for the web as we have for the desktop. However, existing web technologies did not provide a user experience to accomplish the same ease of use on the web.

As Ajax technologies matured and became more prevalent, we felt we could provide this ease of use. But we still had the challenge of providing a uniform experience across as many browsers as possible.

When this project first began, we developed many of the UI controls ourselves. We quickly learned that cross-browser compatibility was difficult and time consuming. We knew if we continued down this development path, the project would be delayed. It became obvious we had to start looking at off-the-shelf components.

We tried a number of individual controls and controls suites from different vendors. We initially choose the r.a.d.controls suite for the r.a.d.treeview and r.a.d.window controls. In addition to the controls best satisfying our requirements, the support in the form of documentation, samples, community, knowledge base and individual attention we received made the decision easier. As the project progressed, the r.a.d.controls suite filled more needs than we initially anticipated. We were soon using 9 different r.a.d.controls in complex scenarios.

While all the controls provide the great benefit of cross-browser compatibility, for our application it was radAjaxManager from the r.a.d.ajax control that became the foundation. Our application is like a desktop application in that there are many ways to accomplish the same task. To do this, we provide a main menu, context menu and a toolbar in addition to standard actions such as clicking and double-clicking. The radAjaxManager allowed us to tie all the different actions together, greatly reducing the code complexity and logic paths between the client and the server.

The end result is a web application as easy to use as our desktop application. The ease of use and responsiveness make it is easy to forget you are using a web application. We could not have accomplished that in the amount of time we did without using the r.a.d.controls suite.

Our application was developed for ASP.Net 2.0 targeting IIS and SQL Server 2000/2005 including MSDE and SQL Server 2005 Express. Total development time was 11 man months.