The project brief was to allow borrowers in remortgage cases to view the status of their case on a secure public website in both graphical and text formats. Additionally, the site needed to show secure messages sent to the borrower.
Findings
An add-on to the Solcase case management system offers a webserver environment from which case data can be accessed directly, however the technology is weak and having the website inside head office, even in the DMZ, is architecturally poor. A better solution was an ASP.NET website hosted at a data centre with secure two-way communications to the database inside the corporate firewall.
We designed, built and host a website (
https://www.fasttrac.co.uk) using the Microsoft platform tools (Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 x64, SQL Server 2005). The initial letter sent to a borrower contains a case code and passcode to enable them to view their case on the site. Additionally the .NET 2.0 membership system enables them to log on and store multiple cases in their profile. This allows brokers and other intermediaries to manage a library of cases on the site.
When case data is requested on the site, the website connects back to a SOAP web service at headquarters over SSL. This conceals the IP address of the webservice to avoid direct DoS attacks and keeps the data secure at all times. The webservice in turn uses some library code we developed to talk over ODBC to the Progress database of the Solcase case management system to get the required data. This is then assembled into XML to return back to the website. Once the case data is received by the website, it is passed through two XSLT transformations. The first transform generates the XHTML for the text description of the case and its status, including image links for the lender's logo etc. The second transform generates CSS required to style the status graphic (which is built from XHTML DIVs) to display the status graphically.
The site is one of a few similar sites in the country which enable remortgage borrowers and lenders to monitor the legal process and it adds significant value for all stakeholders. There is also a considerable saving in postage and a net benefit in carbon footprint.