Microsoft Case Study

Microsoft Logo

Need:

Replace two older marketing campaign planning systems, consolidating them into one new system.

Solution:

Tropics V2, a brand new web application supporting hundreds of users.

Technologies used:

ASP.NET, SQL Server, Access.

J Street designed and developed a system to manage marketing campaigns for Microsoft’s Business Management Operations (BMO) team. The new Tropics V2 system replaced two older systems, consolidating their functionality into one complex ASP.NET web application and SQL Server database, supporting hundreds of users within Microsoft’s intranet. This system also has an Access application to manage configuration and lookup values in the SQL Server back-end database.

This was a complex project that took our team a few thousand hours of development and many months of requirements, design, construction, data conversion, testing and deployment. We worked with stakeholders from many teams at Microsoft, balancing their requirements, business rules and timetables. The system connects with legacy databases and applications, and manages hundreds of complex marketing campaign plans along with their associated tasks, documents, approvals and workflows.

Tropics1
The home page gives the user a quick look at news and alerts, and allows them to quickly sort and select campaigns to work with.
Tropics2
Each marketing campaign has several tabs of information, with dynamic tab descriptions indicating the number of underlying detail records. The data validation logic for these pages was very challenging, with validation rules varying based on the type of campaign, the group owning the campaign, and stage of the campaign in its life cycle.