Offshore Software Development Success Story: RNY is transformed into the leading ethnic web portal

Nov. 28, 2011 - PRLog -- The Situation:

The original goal of RussianNY was to offer a solid web portal to Russian-speaking people in New-York, complete with daily news content, social media features, tools for small businesses, e-commerce elements, and admin features. Instead, the legacy system used several separated, out-of-synch solutions and databases with obsolete technology, which made the web portal slow and unstable. Without modern website technology, RussianNY ran the risk of falling behind competing web portals.

The project was close to failure, so RussianNY.com hired SoftElegance as a software development partner, hoping that a design and technology overhaul could save their web portal.

SoftElegance’s team of developers made a quick turnaround. They chose to continue working with the existing source code, and just six months later the web portal was stable and sustainable. Within a year, the portal went live and brought end users a modern web portal with social networking advantages similar to those found in Facebook and Google+.

Solution: Outsource a Team of Experts

“SoftElegance was brought to the project when it was about to fail,” said Mikhail Dudalenko, VP of RussianNY, “We were inspired by their efficient, professional manner. By partnering with SoftElegance we were able to stay on time and on budget.”

Despite the quick turnaround, the project wasn’t an easy task:  NET 1.0 didn’t even exist when the first version of RussianNY.com was built, but SoftElegance managed to take the original source code and develop the new RussianNY.com using .NET Framework – a decision that ultimately led to faster development and greater savings. “Working with old code can be tedious,” said SoftElegance programmer,  Boris Podporinov, “but using.NET allows us to  create fast, scalable, and secure applications with a wide range of features in a short period of time.”  

Technologies:

In addition to developing with .NET, SoftElegance used Windows Server, MS SQL Server, and IIS.

After updating RussianNY.com’s code, the social media web portal went from being slow and glitchy to becoming a technology leader amongst ethnic social portals in the U.S. The current software version uses development, staging, and production servers. The production server runs on cluster with 2 Windows 2008 R2 Server, and the SQL Server 2008 R2 runs on a separate server with RAID and daily backups. In addition, the .NET Framework 4.0 and IIS 7.5 make RussianNY a fast, scalable, and easy to maintain web project.

After one year of software development partnership with SoftElegance, RussianNY.com successfully runs in production, with modern social media features and a complex server infrastructure. The SoftElegance developers transferred all legacy source code and BDs infrastructure to the latest MS’s, .NET Frameworks, and other related technologies like SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, and IIS. The portal now maintains millions of records in its database and handles thousands of daily users.

Features of the New RussianNY.com

The overhauled RussianNY.com web portal features the following:

-   For social media: RussianNY contains features similar to those of Facebook, such as contacts, user profiles, messaging capabilities, comments, photo galleries, chat, and events, plus blogging tools and more.

-   For e-commerce: RussianNY.com is the leading web portal for distributing show and event tickets in the New York area.

-   For advertising management:  RussianNY’s advertising management system includes user driven banner campaigns and the ability to target promotions to a specific audience and geo-location.

-   For admins and editors: The web portal contains a wide range of admin features for editors and site admins, such as multiple CRUD (create, read, update, delete) features, separate tagging, UI with wide search, and filters across the whole database.

The Future of RussianNY:

Now that the web portal is finished with production, RussianNY has moved onto the support phase and will bring the latest technologies and social features into the project. Going forward, the company mission is to stay up-to-date for their users by bringing all the features of modern social networking into their online community.

Additional projects:
While developing the new RussianNY.com, SoftElegance successfully launched several related sub-projects. The most valuable is the ‘DB migration’ project. In previous versions, this portal used several different separated databases: MySQL and MS SQL Server. The project was created with the goal of exporting all user profiles (approximately 90,000 users) and other user data to the new BD structure powered by Microsoft SQL Server 2008, including the latest security requirements.

RussianNY.com company profile:

website: http://russianny.com

RussianNY.com is a leading Russian-American web portal offering a wide range of social media features, news content, business tools, and more. Since its founding in early 1998, RussianNY.com has grown to include dozens of services, thousands of daily visits, and hundreds of thousands of registered users.

SoftElegance profile

website: http://www.softelegance.com

SoftElegance is an offshore software development company that provides reliable and innovative offshore software development outsourcing. Since 1993, SoftElegance has helped clients use a cost-effective outsourcing model to design, build, and implement systems that positively impact their efficiency, performance, and competitive advantage.

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Outsourcing software development company mastered in .NET Framework, RUP and ASP.NET from Ukraine. Specialization: POS and Retail, Manufacturing, Oil and Gas industries.