Software Projects, Inc.
Established 1987
25 Years of Innovative Technical Service
Software Projects, Inc., parent company of VisionComm Software & Services, was incorporated in 1987 in Georgia and is a full service Information Technology Consulting firm. With clients large and small, local and international, we offer a wide range of software and hardware solutions attuned to each company's needs and resources.
President & CTO
W. Daniel Barker, III
President & Chief Technical Officer
Mr. Barker, a Georgia native and graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology, began his career when Information Technology was simply referred to as "computers." With his BS degree in Information and Computer Science, he was among the first graduates of Georgia Tech in this new field. He gained early experience and insight working in Atlanta's emerging IT field during the 1980's
Establishing Software Projects, Inc. in 1987, Mr. Barker set about to give companies a resource other than the big, expensive firms that dominated the early IT landscape. Before long, even they began turning to him for his intuitive insight into technical architecture. Whether the project involves software or hardware, Mr. Barker's extensive experience and astute intellect lend themselves to money-saving insights for the client.
Over the years, Mr. Barker has developed software that is used by companies large and small around the world. He has partnered with local and international companies to bring his technical expertise to projects as diverse as small office start-ups, data recovery after 9/11, performance tuning and virtualization. He holds patents in software design as well as mechanical inventions. He enjoys the challenge inherent in the rapidly changing IT field with its fast-paced innovations.
Facilities
Development often involves disruptive actions on the underlying systems. To completely isolate our development work from our clients' production environment, we have in place:
- SQL Server, Oracle and UDB database systems
- Linux, Windows and IBM Mainframe servers (both production and development)
- IIS, Apache (with and without Cold Fusion) web servers
- T1 connectivity (very low utilization - Effectively 100% available for projects)
- Daily and offsite backups
- Delphi and Dot Net IDE environments
- Fully virtualized infrastructure, enabling rapid deployment of test systems
- and of course, over twenty years experience, bringing real efficiencies to the development process.
Case Studies
We have extensive experience automating Email data flows. In one project, a large Medical Resources organization contracted us to replicate their Call Center in a Web presence for similar questions with input via a Web form rather than telephone.
The skill sets of the various Call Center agents were listed in the database. We created an interface to the database of questions that the Call Center application could access. The question was then routed to the agent based on their area of medical expertise, language and so forth. The result was an extremely efficient system. The research work actually flowed better than the voice version, in part because the up-front classification from the Web input. The answers were typed rather than verbalized and then emailed to the constituent. Replies were queued on the same session as the original web-form allowing any agent with matching skills to handle the reply.
Database tuning (radius)
When working with a large database containing location data, we were tasked with developing queries to return locations within a certain radius of a source. The example queries from the leading Mapping API vendors all had the radius function included in the WHERE clause. This required the entire table contents to be retrieved, a radius computed, and then most of the records discarded.
We added indexes on the latitude and longitude of the potential locations, modified the quiries to utilize these new indexes and thereby reduced the number of compute-radius operations (and the necessary fetch from the table of the data) by three orders of magnitude.
Adobe dual interface
A large medical information organization developed a massive library useful to the layperson. They would accept requests for documents by telephone or email and would then mail the documents at some expense.
They requested that we reproduce these documents in the Adobe PDF format to allow the request to be emailed.
The documents were hosted in a Lotus Notes database which can provide the documents as HTML documents. The post-processing to make the HTML acceptable (different fonts, headers, re-linking all the images) was very straightforward code.
The final step, however, was converting the HTML to a PDF. Adobe's Acrobat software exposes two Office Automation interface APIs; DDE, which is mostly obsolete, and OLE, which is the current standard. However, the DDE interface supports "Open HTML" but does not support "SaveAs PDF". Oddly enough, the OLE interface supports "SaveAs PDF" but does not support "Open HTML". Although opening two Office Automation interfaces between the same two applications seems odd, that is just what we did by using DDE to Open the HTML and the OLE API to SaveAs PDF.
Wireless ISP Design
While vacationing at the top of Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, I recognized a need for high-speed internet service to the businesses and homes in the valley below.
Because of the location at the top of a mountain, I realized that internet service could be provided using inexpensive, common equipment. I developed this idea into a fully functional, commercial Wireless Internet Service Provider business that today serves hundreds of customers.
The firewall between our wireless customers and the public internet was implemented in iptables on Linux with firewall rules that were dynamically modified as the accounts were created or expired. The users were routed to their intended internet locations, and non-users were offered the option of signing up for immediate service.
For more information
For more informaion about our services, please give me a call at (678) 513-4504 x 11, or drop me a note at dbarker@visioncomm.net.
