Orion - MiniCRM Lightswitch and Azure

What does your application (or extension) do? What business problem does it solve?

Orion is a Mini-CRM (That's how I call it). It is based on all my client needs like POS records, service requests, field technicians workload, inventory, inventory tracking, fuel management and operational reports. It's in Spanish because of my client needs.

The features (modules, as I call them) are adapted to the business needs:

• POS Records (Publicity, Contracts, POS Category Level per Sales)
• System Requests
• Service Requests
• Ticket Cancellations (Cancellations that have been requested of lottery tickets printed on their proprietary terminals)
• Line Reports (Phone/Internet issues that have been reported to the provider)
• Inventory/Historical/Tracking Assets
• Field Technicians/Operator Workload and Rating (Who is the best technician/operator and what is his assignment level)
• Sales Reports
• Claims from customers
• Operational Reports (Weekly reports with charts of all the operations the business has done)
• Fuel Management (Weekly, Monthly and Yearly)
• Automated Emails
• Reports to Outlook

Before Orion, my client used emails, lots of papers and spreadsheets to keep track of from all the POS (more than 700 POS approx). Now with Orion, they have all the business data in one place.They have access from anywhere thanks to Azure and also the control of all the data that comes in and goes out in the business.

It was impossible to them to have such control in the past.

How many Screens and Entities Does this Application Have?

37 Screens and 19 Entities

Did LightSwitch Save your Business Money? How?

Lightswitch saved me a lot of time by reducing the development timeline considerably. Because Lightswitch is very scalable, Orion is rented as SaaS, everytime my client needs a new module, I can build it very quickly and thanks to the fact that my app is deployed in Windows Azure, I don't have to worry about all the infrastucture or support on hardware. As an independent developer, time is money for me. I wouldn't have achieved that by using any other technology by myself only.

How Many Users Does this Application Support?

At the moment, it is supporting 25 users.Technically, it can support as many users as the business asks for.

How Long Did This Application Take to Actually Build using LightSwitch?

I took 2 months developing it by myself. At the beginning, it was designed to run on premises, but then I changed my mind and I thought it was better to publish it as a desktop deploy on Azure. In this way, I could save my client on buying server or licenses and also make my software more profitable as SaaS.

However ORION is always under development, I keep adding features and improving the app for my client.

Does this Application Use any LightSwitch Extensions? If so, which ones? Did you write any of these extensions yourself? If so, is it available to the public? Where?

I used several extensions from third parties vendors due the need for making my application like an affordable CRM with powerful tools:

• DevExpress Reports
• Infragistics Net Advantage controls
• ComponentOne OLAP

How did LightSwitch make your developer life better? Was it faster to build compared to other options you considered?

Lightswitch and Windows Azure made my life easier by enabling me to reach the SaaS market. Now I have one company which trusts in my product, thanks to the quick response to their needs everytime.

A Mini-CRM using Windows Forms would have taken me a LOT of time to develop, debug and maintain. That's why I considered using Lightswitch for my project.

I say Lightswitch is a very innovative tool. It saves us developers a lot of time and headaches when developing CRUD applications. Lightswitch is a symbol of fast-developing tool with quality. Now I use Lightswitch as a framework for rapid-developing business apps.