JDIS Case Study - John Deere Dealer Portal

Business Scenario

John Deere is a leading company engaged in manufacturing of agricultural equipment. John Deere also manufactures construction, golf and home user equipments and has presence in many countries. John Deere sells these equipments through their dealer network. Their customers can view their account and other information through dealer website. John Deere wanted to create a portal for their customers who would then be able to have a uniform look and feel of the applications and able to retrieve invoices, previous transaction details, and request a quote online etc through the portal. John Deere also wanted that the portal should be co-branded with Dealer with who they are attached. In other words, the portal should give a feel of Dealer portal using dealer's logo and dealer's links etc.

The Challenge

John Deere wanted to implement an end-to-end portal including portlet development, setting up portal infrastructure, configuring the portal with connectivity to current legacy system etc. The portal infrastructure will be shared among various department of John Deere using Virtual Portal. Each department has different look and feel needs, user registries, and other business needs and Deere wanted to bring all existing portals on a common shared environment for cost saving. Another need was Web 2.0 look and feel and rich presentation. John Deere needed that the dealers should have the facility to upload their logo and manage their own contents through WebSphere Content Management server. There was a need for interoperability between Java and .Net, as the part of business logic was available on .Net. All these had to be done remotely from offshore development centers of YASH. WAS and Portal were hosted on Linux.

YASH's Solution

YASH implemented the solution, including designing the customer and dealer portals, themes which go with John Deere Companyâ??s themes. Portlets were designed and deployed using YASH Portlet Framework, which is a rapid portlet application development framework and speed-up development of portlet applications many-folds. The project also required connectivity with John Deere's proprietary systems for User database and LDAP. This project also involved fetching information from WebServices hosted on .Net which were again created by SyncEx team.

Benefit

Due to single team implementing the entire solution there was a better coordination, and using the YASH Portlet Framework resulted in quicker development time. SyncEx's extensive knowledge and previous experience on Websphere portal and JSR 168 and 286 resulted in lot of problems to be resolved faster resulting in cost saving for the client.