There is great satisfaction in giving back to the community and Brisinger Group, a provider of software and Web site solutions, has found a way to harness their developers’ talents to assist nonprofit organizations. Together with ComponentOne, they are now able to offer nonprofit organizations solutions to their Web site and internet tool needs.

Business Needs

Brisinger Group needed to produce quality Rich Internet Applications for various nonprofits that offered a significant reduction in the cost of development and maintenance time. The goal was to provide their clients with superior solutions at an affordable price. Brisinger Group’s solutions are primarily DotNetNuke Portal solutions that range from small e-commerce sites to large scale volunteer/employee management systems.

Brisinger Group, Inc. was working on a volunteer/employee management portal for a nonprofit agency that captured individual and group statistics on the amount of hours spent on projects. They estimated the development time would be close to 1200 hours. With a limited budget for development, the Brisinger Group, Inc. needed to find a way to lower the development time, thus lowering cost, while still providing a quality solution and offering an even better user experience.

In addition, Brisinger Group’s reporting development time was draining their resources. They were constantly updating reports and/or creating new reports, coded by hand, due to ever changing reporting needs.

Solution

Brisinger Group was hand coding all of their AJAX, custom components and reports. They realized their need for a solution that provided both high quality and performance based UI components along with a quality reporting solution. After evaluating several options, Brisinger Group discovered ComponentOne Report Designer and from there expanded into the use of the ComponentOne’s ASP.NET controls included in ComponentOne Studio Enterprise.

ComponentOne Studio Enterprise components gave Brisinger Group access to 100s of enterprise-ready components including grids, charts, reports, schedules, menus, toolbars, editors, and more. This component suite provided Brisinger Group everything they needed to offer a high quality RIA experience via scalable and performance optimized sites, at a development cost savings of 30%. “We have used just about every ASP.NET and WinForms control included in ComponentOne Studio Enterprise. The ones that we use most often and would have spent a small fortune to develop ourselves would be the C1Splitter, C1Tab, C1Schedule, C1Menus, and the advanced grids,” said Robert Collins, President at Brisinger Group.

“ComponentOne is the only solution that provided both high quality and performance optimized UI components along with a world-class reporting solution,” stated Robert Collins. “Specifically, we were looking for advanced controls that were already AJAX enabled out of the box and still performed when it came to high traffic situations. ComponentOne offered us just that. We also needed a high quality reporting solution that allows organizations to create and maintain reports without the guidance of our developers. Again, ComponentOne offered us that exactly.”

Benefits

Brisinger Group was able to reduce the average time to develop a volunteer/employee management site from 1200 hours to 900 hours by using ComponentOne controls. “It is obvious ComponentOne rigorously tests and robustly builds their controls with many scenarios in mind. Prior to using ComponentOne’s controls, we encountered bugs and controls that did not address our needs,” said Collins. “Rather than building our own controls that are very targeted, we now use ComponentOne controls that have been tested for many situations and thus they do not have the issues we have seen from our home grown controls. We have seen our support costs reduce by 50% since using ComponentOne’s controls.”

“The components are AJAX enabled plus responsive and the reporting system is amazing. It is like the large reporting tools in power, but much simpler to use and with licensing that doesn’t break the bank,” said Collins. “We evaluated other offerings, but chose ComponentOne because of the time savings discovered with ComponentOne’s reporting tool and comprehensive component suite.”

With the ComponentOne Report Designer, Brisinger Group was able to relinquish control of the reporting task to the nonprofit directly, allowing them to quickly and easily create the exact reports they needed. “This was all done without giving up any quality; rather our solutions are far nicer than ever before,” said Collins. “The reporting system is such a notable difference as far as components and software solution offerings; our clients have never been happier with what we offer.”

“Given ComponentOne offers extremely beautifully themed controls, we have not had to spend time developing a sleek UI. We know that ComponentOne controls look great out of the box and if we do have to re-theme, they offer a well documented set of classes we can use and tools that help us quickly make these changes,” said Collins.

Client Feedback

“The solution we were able to develop with ComponentOne products supports up to thousands of total users with hundreds of concurrent users. The solutions serve not only the nonprofit organizations but their end users, volunteers, employees and clients. With the ComponentOne subscription model, every time they release a new version we are able to take our applications even further and our clients sing praises,” said Collins.

“My recommendation is to get ComponentOne Studio Enterprise and ComponentOne Report Designer before you even start your first line of code or architectural document,”

-Robert Collins, President

At Brisinger Group we are dedicated to providing the most flexible and user friendly learning environment available today. From corporations and government to universities and online training sites, our Learning Management System (LMS) has the power and flexibility to handle the demanding requirements of training and education in the 21st century. When it comes to learning, delivery of training, and the management of your services, Brisinger Group’s LMS is the final piece of the puzzle. Let use help you to create the learning environment you require and your students will love. www.brisingergroup.com

ComponentOne is a privately held company headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA, with offices throughout the world. ComponentOne has continued leadership in the Microsoft Visual Studio component industry, and as a premiere partner of Microsoft. ComponentOne provides a wide range of Visual Studio Components, IDE platform development tools and applications, and several award winning applications. ComponentOne Studio Enterprise represents a broad and complete set of tools and solutions for Microsoft® Windows, Web-based, and Mobile application developers. www.componentone.com