Ciasoft Creates Power BI Dashboards within Legacy .NET Application

by Homegrown Development October 1, 2021

CHALLENGE

Computer Ingenuity Associates is a technology services firm providing analytics solutions to the United States leading hospitality and hotel businesses. The mid-sized business was looking to create Power BI dashboards inside of its existing .NET web portal in order to service its hotel customers.These dashboards would be built on Ciasoft’s existing Azure SQL database.

SOLUTION

HGS delivered a Power BI based reporting solution, new SQL Server customizations in a new reporting database, Power BI administration, including scheduling, row level based security, and AD group based security, and post-implementation on going customizations and support. Below shows an example of an architecture diagram that shows how the customer's Azure AD is leveraged for the Power BI security groups and overall embedded architecture.

The project was conducted in three phases, first, the SQL Server customizations, second, the Power BI development and administration, and third, the .NET implementation and embedding. The Power BI based reporting solution consisted of the Ciasoft hosted Azure SQL databases that feeds in data for all of the Ciasoft hotel customers.

HGS created SQL customizations in order to aggregate all of the customer data across all Ciasoft databases and bring the data into Power BI for reporting. Power BI dashboard was built according to stakeholder requirements and RLS groups were created according to Azure AD customer emails so that within the Power BI dashboard every Ciasoft customer only saw their own data when logging in. Once the Power BI dashboard was deployed it was embedded into the Ciasoft web portal to give a seamless online digital experience, as seen below.

TEAM

The Ciasoft team consisted of a project manager, solution architect, and two associate developers.

DELIVERY

Through an agile process the team was able to continuously integrate feedback throughout the design and development process. The software development life cycle consisted of a design, development, UAT testing, and a production launch. Stand ups were held bi-weekly. Project management suite included bitbucket for version control, JIRA for ticket tracking, and Mattermost for constant communication.

IMPACT

With the help of HGS, Ciasoft was able to create and embed a Power BI dashboard into their existing web portal giving their customers a new analytics interface that was unavailable before. Now, in addition to static reporting Ciasoft customers are able to view all of their data by properties in dynamic reports with filtering and associated groupings that they were not able to accomplish before. Ciasoft was able to accomplish this both on budget and on time in order to implement this release for their customers according to their promise date. Furthermore they are were able to release this solution in a single web portal view due to the RLS security as each customer is able to see their own data dynamically.