Financial Chronicle on the web

With over 20 years experience in the field, Financial Chronicle's commitment and their history in the marketplace have allowed them to accumulate a large volume of transaction and information (over 200,000 records) of the real estate market. In existing, Financial Chronicle's core business is to issue hardcopy transaction reports to their members in a daily basis. Those reports cover all areas of property projects including Residential, Commercial and Industrial. Besides, they also issue building profile CDROM every year to their members for off-line reference. Leveraging the convenience and anytime access of Internet benefits, they have initialized a vision on transforming their existing business services from Off-line basis to On-line basis. Financial Chronicle, thus, contracted Alfacom Solutions to develop an Extranet Property Information and Analysis portal site.

Background
Financial Chronicle, established in 1979, is the most experienced Real Estate Information House in Hong Kong. Their research team understands and monitors Hong Kong's property market and provides a complete and up-to-date analysis to their subscriber daily. Being a leading real estate information provider in the market, Financial Chronicle members come from wide spectrum of specialty including famous Real Estate Developers, Valuators, Bankers, Real Estate Agencies, Brokers and those who view Real Estate development in Hong Kong as a long-term investment.

Challenge
With over 200,000 transactions and more than 4,000 building profiles, both the existing non-scalable computer system and office physical space are running out of capacity if the information keep growing exponentially every day. Besides, prolong printing process on delivering transaction information cannot satisfy nowadays client expectation. Without integrating the transaction and the building profile information together into one deliverable, the members cannot get the in-depth information of each transaction. There will have no significant growth in revenue if the overhead such as paper, printing cost and etc are keep increasing. Today clients are so demanding and the competition is so vigorous in the market and it is inevitable for Financial Chronicle moves to on-line business.

Solution
Alfacom Solutions Professional Services team conducted a four months period to complete the Financial Chronicle Extranet Property Information and Analysis portal site and services including from requirement study to application deployment. The project scope is mainly divided into four parts. The first part is the core application development. The application is written in Java and runs on the top of JBoss Application Server connecting to IBM DB2 as a back-end database. Functions include: Building Profile Retrieval combines with dynamic Flash Generator tool (J Generator) which provides an interactive way for subscribers to view different graphical plans; Transaction Retrieval, Home Seeker, Home Valuation, Market Pointer and Property Analysis. The second part is the Client/Server basis Content Management System development. The system is written in Microsoft Visual Basic and it natively connects to the database server through ODBC connection. The third part is the schedule basis matching scripting which run every night in order to avoid daily operation impact. The scripting is used to match all the transaction instances to particular building profile in order to feed adequate data for the system to perform analysis. The fourth part is the database migration and data propagation.

Why partner with Alfacom Solutions
Technical staff of Alfacom Solutions possesses diversified skills. Our team is very knowledgeable in Java and database integration. In the project, Alfacom delivers the project on time and exceeds Financial Chronicle's expectation.

Business Benefits
After transformed the core business into the Internet, Financial Chronicle retains the leading position in the market. Subscribers are very pleased with the performance and convenience. Based on the positive feedback from the valued users, Financial Chronicle is now ready to roll out more property services and at the same time lower their operation costs.

Key Components
> Software component
* JBoss J2EE Server on Linux
* J Generator
* IBM DB2 on Linux
* Linux Redhat

> Hardware component
* Compag PC Servers

> Service element
* Java application development
* Microsoft VB application development
* Web Design
* Data Migration and Propagation