Our client, a privately-held family company, is a leading software vendor that provides data management, integration and exchange software solutions for public safety, law enforcement and other public sectors. The company helps ensure officer and citizen safety through cost-effective information management, sharing, integration and analysis.
The Challenge
Ensuring public safety can’t be done from behind a desk. Quick access to mission-critical information in the field is essential for police officers, detectives, sheriffs and other public safety professionals constantly on the move. That's why, time-consuming, repetitive tasks such as incident reporting, evidence tracking, entity searches, and other key functions should be automated and made available across platforms and devices. Our client needed to transform and modernize their solutions in order to meet the needs of a younger generation of increasingly mobile workforce and keep up with their expectations for modern technology and software. They had to modernize their solutions to simplify and automate time-consuming tasks such as data entry, integrate with other new apps and technologies, as well as implement NIBRS compliance.
“Our customers want software that runs seamlessly across devices and operating systems, so they can access it anywhere”
Solution
Together with Resolute Software, the client embarked on a multi-phased modernization project, with the goal of meeting several requirements essential for the success of the project:
- Modern, future-proof technology stack
The larger part of their system was written in a blend of Delphi, .NET and HTML. Standardizing on C#/.NET Core and Angular enables a robust, resilient and performant application architecture that can support intuitive user experiences on any device and operating system. - Offline operation and sync
The new system must support offline operation, so data is automatically synced to the system once a connection is established. - Responsive design
As our client’s customers will be accessing the software primarily on mobile devices, responsive design was essential to ensure adoption and usability. - Data security
Storage on the client must be encrypted to protect sensitive information that officers enter via their devices. - Access and Permissions
To keep data secure, the system must be able to authenticate users and apply license and permissions regardless of location, device or network connectivity. - Messaging
The new platform must support an integrated messaging solution for sending alerts between users.
To meet the demand for a robust, yet flexible application infrastructure, we designed a distributed microservice architecture based on .NET Core and Oracle. Breaking the classic monolith into a set of microservices allowed our client to deploy core application capabilities both on customer premises as well as on private cloud infrastructure, depending on business needs.
Application services communicate with each other and with the database through a shared message bus that helps orchestrate data flow in the system core. A distributed multi-tier user authentication and licensing subsystem manages end-user access to the system, delegating authentication to related tenant identity providers.
Backed by a flexible core application infrastructure, the system provides an intuitive end-user experience through multiple responsive web-based applications. Powered by Angular and taking full advantage of modern browser technologies for caching, storage and encryption, the client’s web apps run on any device, transform intuitively to fit any screen size, and enhance the end-user productivity both out in the field and behind a desk.
Results
By providing cross-platform compatibility, mobile functionality and a modern interface, our client gained strong competitive advantage. Its modernized Public Safety Software will meet the needs of its customer base in 2020 and beyond, as it will be agile enough to accommodate innovations in public safety technology as they become available.