Posts tagged azure
CitySourced Reporting Is Now Live!
Dec 28th
We at CitySourced are constant looking to improve our product offerings, and we’re happy to announce today that we’re going live with a new suite of reporting tools geared exclusively to our customers. We’ve been collecting data with our smartphone applications (available on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7) for over a year now, and it’s been starting to pile up. Now our customers can make use of this data and gain valuable insights into their workflow. With the new reporting application, our customers can now see:
- Total Reports by Date (Annual, Quarter, Month, Day)
- Total Reports by Report Type (Pothole, Graffiti, Street Light, etc.)
- Total Reports by Device Type (iPhone, Android, WP7, etc.)
- Total Reports by Device OS (iPhone 3.0, 3.1.2, Android 2.0, etc.)
- Total Reports by Status Type (Submitted, Received, Closed, etc.)
- Average Time to Close a Report
- Shortest Time to Close a Report
- Longest Time to Close a Report
All of these reports can also be broken down based on time period (ex: All reports from last 120 days, broken down by month or day). And, of course, all of the reports can be viewed on a map, giving a much needed geographical context.
We’ve implemented this solution on top of Azure in partnership with Microsoft. All of the reporting data will be stored in Azure Tables (for virtually infinite scalability) and the reports are batched processed by a Worker Role running in the Azure Cloud.
With the new Reporting application, our customers are now better equipped to analyze the data we’ve been collecting for them. Better analysis equals better decision making for both existing and future policy making. Better decision making will result in better quality of life for the residents of our customers. It’s a win-win for everyone involved. One can only imagine the possibilities: isolate gang movement and potential turf wars with graffiti analysis; locate infrastructure issues by seeing what streets are flooded most often; identify traffic and road usage by looking at potholes. The possibilities are truly endless!
If you’d like to see how these reports look and work, our sales team will be happy to drive you through an online demo. Feel free to contact them!
CitySourced to Leverage Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform for their Government Customers
Feb 23rd
We got a very nice mention in Microsoft’s Public Sector Weblog today!
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CitySourced to Leverage Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform for their Government Customers
CitySourced has selected Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform as the foundation for their application infrastructure..
We will do a detailed blog-post over the next month or two, but below is a short one about FreedomSpeaks/CitySourced, goals to address their future needs, and broad outline of their plans to leverage Microsoft’s suite of Windows Azure services.
Background about the organization and the service – CitySourced is a real time mobile civic engagement tool. The CitySourced suite of applications has three main components. 1) The Console, which provides an administrative extranet for government agencies to manage the incoming customer support requests; 2) The Website, a consumer facing website encouraging citizens to engage with their local government as well as providing complete transparency to their government’s day-to-day operations; 3) A Smartphone application that enables citizens and residents to submit non-emergency service requests (i.e., potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) directly to their local government. The CitySourced platform presents a unique opportunity for government to use technology to both save money and improve accountability to those they govern. It also creates a positive, collaborative platform for real action. The mission of CitySourced is to transform civic engagement and enable citizens to make their communities a better place.
Here are some of the goals/drivers that led CitySourced to adopt cloud-based offering:
- CitySourced’s application utilized multi-layered architecture based on Microsoft ASP.NET on Windows Server 2003/IIS6.0 and SQL Server 2005 on three servers. CitySourced continues to get a lot of visibility in various cities around the country, and needed a plan to implement a scalable cloud based solution to handle the anticipated future demand.
- Focus was more on deliver better service and high-value features to both the government and consumer entities, so the goal was to stay away from hardware/software acquisition, management and monitoring of the infrastructure and the application.
- CitySourced also wanted to improve back-end job-processing service and log storage.
- CitySourced explored several options with the key goal being to avoid making major changes to their application code-base, in-memory cache layer and database layer.
- All of the above helped CitySourced choose Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform to host and manage the CitySourced application.
Goals & plans for Phase 1: (To be completed by March, 2010)
· Migrate the entire application infrastructure to Azure (web, cache, and databases) with a minimum amount of disturbance to their core business processes.
· Migrate with a minimal amount of refactoring to existing code (focusing on system changes, not code changes).
Goals & plans for Phase 2: (To be completed by May, 2010)
· Leverage Windows Azure Storage & Tables for more scalable storage of logs and other binary data (such as serialized hash tables and image blobs).
· Migrate their existing homegrown (and database dependent) queue workflow to Windows Azure Queue services.
· Offload jobs processing from Window’s based services onto dedicated worker instances.
Benefits & End-Result- CitySourced is confident that a cloud computing solution based on Microsoft Windows Azure will enable them to deliver better service to a broader audience (more customers) without worrying about infrastructure, software acquisition and service management.
High-Level architecture of their next-generation solution:
