• Omnis cross platform solution •
Lineal Software build Data Mining Web App for The European Network on Silica (NEPSI) with Omnis Studio.
An Omnis & Microsoft Azure Case Study from Lineal Software Solutions Ltd.
The Challenge:
The European Network on Silica (NEPSI) is a European Commission-funded organisation committed to workplace safety in heavy industries where crystalline silica dust may constitute a respiratory danger to employees.
Supported by industry associations and trade unions across more than thirty EU and non-EU countries, NEPSI conducts a regular Europe-wide digital health and safety survey of mining, aggregates, ceramic and glassware sites to monitor workplace safety.
The project demanded a de-centralised, multi-lingual and web-based survey platform under which each Trade Association could enrol thousands of industry site managers and other stakeholders across their respective countries. Data would be aggregated centrally for analysis published in NEPSI’s biennial report.
Thousands of registered participants are invited to take part using an automated bulk email service, inviting their own sub-sites and industry networks to enrol over a 6-month data-mining cycle from February to August.
The Solution
Lineal’s in-house Software Development Team built an Omnis solution, hosted within Microsoft Azure, to provide a flexible and highly available reporting service. As a Certified Microsoft Gold Partner, Lineal chose Microsoft Azure’s cloud-computing platform to maximise the availability of the NEPSI service across all three European time zones.
Providing a record 99.94% uptime, Azure offered the perfect datacentre network for the portal’s underlying PostgreSQL database and server client, ensuring submissions from thousands of international end-users could be reliably and securely sent to Lineal’s front-end Omnis web application.
With support from the team at Omnis, the NEPSI survey also formed a solution that scaled intelligently to meet fluctuating demand – allowing the number of concurrent users to expand due to high traffic, as larger organisations were enrolled, or submission deadlines approached.
Data mining on this scale also demanded Lineal’s team plan carefully for the diversity of end-user technology environments. Likely to be accessed on thousands of different traditional desktops and low-cost smartphones, or across regions with lower broadband connectivity, the NEPSI portal was designed to be fast to load, simple, and operate smoothly on a range of different screen-sizes.
Screenshots
The Company
Lineal Software was founded in the 1980s as a business software developer, and has grown to become a comprehensive, extensively skilled IT company, providing managed IT support, hardware, cloud-based, cybersecurity, communications and telephony services, in addition to software development. Their current team of twenty-eight is led by Mike Matthews (Managing Director), who takes a keen interest in supporting North Devon’s local economy, skills base and STEM education, and is keen supporter of the Omnis community attending many of the developer conferences in Europe. Lineal is one of the few Gold Certified Microsoft Partners in the South West, a UK G-Cloud supplier to the public sector, and partner with a wide selection of technology vendors to provide their customers with a high-quality choice of excellent IT solutions.
Why Omnis
“Omnis Studio was an obvious choice to use to develop this application as it enabled us to develop the application rapidly using one tool and deploy on any end user platform. We also benefit from a much closer relationship with Omnis than we would with other IDE providers.”
Mike Matthews Managing Director Lineal Software Solutions.
“For us, Omnis development tools help us deploy to end-users faster, cross-platform, and extend with open source tools such as PHP and JavaScript components. It’s valuable to have such an established and reliable business partner with a worldwide developer community, with great UK-based support.”
Lineal staff worked closely with NEPSI representatives to write a detailed specification for the project, run a full test-cycle for the system, refine any issues, and maintain the survey over the long-term.
Mike Matthews
Managing Director Lineal Software Solutions