Telcorum Technology
The Telcorum™ software suite is a modern, three tier, pure Java application. It is engineered for performance, robustness and scalability.
Features
Modular design means that new functionality can be added through the installation of new software components without the need for a high-risk overhaul.
Being a pure Java application means that Telcorum can be deployed on any platform that supports the Java Virtual Machine.
Deployment
Your actual deployment depends on the scale of the planned rollout and the Tecorum modules involved. Telcorum can be deployed on a single machine but generally we recommend separate CPUs for the database, application server and firewall.
Telcorum has been proven to smoothly scale up to thousands of concurrent users and has handled millions of hits a day. Our architecture supports load balancing and failover for high throughput and maximum reliability.
Presentation
Telcorum is designed with a user front end that is usable through most modern web browsers. The application is zero-footprint in that no Applets or other plug-ins need to be installed on the client workstation.
The look is modern and functional. Whitesmiths' experience in building user interfaces for telecommunications Customer Service Representatives, dealers and other customer focused users for more than ten years has been leveraged to provide a clear and yet efficient workflow for both occasional and heavy users.
The interface is responsive at all times. Time-consuming operations are queued so that the user can get on with other work while they are processed.
Graphics is kept to a minimum so that operation over dial-up or wireless data connections is quite practical.
Business Logic
Business logic is divided into three categories:
- Simple field validation
- Multi field validation rules
- Business rules
Simple field validation is done in the browser using simple DHTML. Multi-field validation is done in Web Objects. More complex business rules, such as interdependency between fields are expressed in the server.
Business rules, such as requirements relating to whether a customer meets minimum thresholds for account creation, are captured in scripts which can be altered by your business analysts without a full QA cycle.
This multi-tier business rule design strategy means that as your business changes, Telcorum can change to meet new requirements.
Data Layer
Enterprise objects represent the data objects that are actually stored in your enterprise systems including:
- Billing system
- Provisioning systems
- CRM data warehouse
Telcorum itself keeps a unified view of the customer in a local database cache which is written through to your enterprise systems at key business logic transitions.
The benefits of this approach are:
- Consistent high performance for users
- Isolation from outages of enterprise systems
- A single, merged, view of a customer is available to users
Interfaces to enterprise systems are built on the Java Connector Architecture which includes JDBC database connections if possible. Whitesmiths has a great deal of experience in building transactional interfaces to enterprise systems. Techniques we've used in the past include:
- Direct database connections
- Transaction file submission
- Screen scraping
- Message switch interfaces
If (when) an enterprise system goes down or is slow to respond, Telcorum is able to use a variety of techniques to get the transaction through:
- Retrying
- Queuing
- Throttling
- Intelligent error handling
- Manual intervention via a worklist mechanism
