We are proud to present our new single-point-of-management configuration tool: the Miles Management Console (MMC).
General system configuration and administrative activities are inextricably linked to both the Miles set-up and its everyday operational use. For example, configuring user roles, setting up security, enabling or disabling policies etc… are all key actions to be carried out on a regular basis.

These activities required the use of various tools, such as the Miles Configurator and several administration web pages. To facilitate the entire configuration handling and bring customer satisfaction to a higher level, we decided to replace these tools by a single application management configuration tool. Early 2010, we released the first version of the MMC.

Single point of management

The Miles Management Console offers significant look & feel and usability enhancements:

• a single point of management for all kinds of application configuration without the need for file access and file editing skills
• powerful and feature-rich graphical user interface elements, such as smart toolbars and buttons, sortable and groupable grid views...
• improved search functionalities, to retrieve objects faster and more efficiently
• improved work management, to access the most frequently used functions through a fully customizable portal
• a customizable menu tree, to display only those items relevant to the user
• central management of different Miles environments

Furthermore, new functionalities were added:

• configuration change management, all configuration data is now stored in the database with the possibility to trace changes and transfer them across different Miles environments
• configuration deployment, a full configuration set can now be deployed to new Miles environment
• policy management, application behavior plug-ins are now also stored in the database and easier to manage
• improved user management, such as the possibility to ‘clone’ users
• improved security management, new views allowing to retrieve and update security settings in a single window

Google Web Toolkit

The MMC is developed in Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Rich Internet Application (RIA) language. This is an open-source technology, which gives us the possibility to create a web client with the look and feel of its desktop counterpart.

Next: User interface replacement

The MMC is a first milestone on the road to one of Sofico’s most challenging strategic projects for the next few years: replacing the Miles client by a web-based user interface.
This year, the target is to lay the foundation for the user interface replacement project. In the coming years, we will incrementally migrate the Miles client to Google Web Toolkit.