Challenge
The Echelon online portal "Advisor First" was residing on the Telus network. The cost of renting the server and subscribing to the software for the portal was expensive. Based on the size and capacity of Echelon, it made more sense economically and as a business for them to build their own software system and host it on a server in-house.
Solution
We created a new internal management portal using a PHP framework and offering better UX and UI design for 250 staff members.
Results
This solution simplified and streamlined the companies business processes and resulted in a savings of $1.2 million over a two year period.
Additional Info
The portal was created on an open source framework, deployed using the Linux Operating System. Discover details about how we created the architecture below.
Server
A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is now hosted in Echelon’s hosting environment where it can communicate directly with Echelon’s Active Directory Server.
Operating System
We used a Linux kernel based operating system for the servers.
Web-Server
For this particular project, FLD used NGINX as the web-server as oppose to Apache. NGINX can be tightly integrated with Linux kernel features to gain a boost in performance, whereas Apache tends to slow down under heavy load due to the need to spawn new processes and threads, consuming more computer memory.
Database
MYSQL database.
Programming Framework
Laravel PHP stack was used as a framework for the portal development because of its simplicity and flexible features.
