Is it possible to move 600 users from a desktop application to an online application in just 2 months?
YES, it is!
For a big customer in the healthcare industry we converted their desktop application with SQL server back-end to an online application hosted in Azure in just two months.
The desktop application was built by us, 14 years ago. Original build to serve about 50 users, the last year it was serving up to 600 users without problems! To save costs the client wanted to get rid of all desktop applications and let their employees work online 100%.
We made a plan to convert the application and created it in two months!
Here is how we did it
Front-end Angular
We proposed to build the front-end (the actual application that the user see and use) in Angular 7 with Material Design. We choose Material Design, so that the application will have a pleasant and familiar look for the users. An other benefit is that we don’t have to design everything from scratch, which saves a ton of time.
Back-end ASP.NET Core and Azure database
The original database was a Microsoft SQL server database. With just a few adjustments we migrated this database to Azure SQL database. The original database already provided almost all necessary data via stored procedures and functions.
With ASP.NET Core 2.1 we created the REST Web API to serve as the back-end. We implemented Authentication and authorization in the API.
We integrated Azure Application Insights which provides logging on the server and gives detailed performance reports. Great!
Azure hosting
Everything is hosted in Azure. This frees us from dealing with setting up servers, databases, security, etc.