DEVELOPMENT OF INTERNAL PORTAL WEB APPLICATION AT DJARUM GROUP

By :  Alnov Lucky, Stevanus Sugianto, Ida Sri Rejeki Siahaan

In recent years, information technology development has been growing rapidly. Nowadays people live in an era in which the use of information technology is necessary to support their needs. For instance: in business, information technology development can help a company simplify their business process. Some benefits that a company can receive from Information Technology Development are as follows:

  1. reducing the operational costs
  2. simplifying the communication
  3. improving activity productivity
  4. improving efficiency of service time
  5. improving service to consumers

Hence, Djarum Group improves their business process by utilizing Information Technology Development. Djarum Group managed to make a lot of useful applications for their business requirements. However these applications still separated makes them difficult to access. So there is a need of a portal application that accumulates all the applications to meet business requirements needed by each particular department.

Internal Portal is a web-application that contains information of the company; they are global news, company news, and company event information. Basically, it is a main web-application of this company, so each employee has access to this portal application. Moreover, there are applications inside Internal Portal that provide both basic services and particular department needs. The current Internal Portal was developed by using .NET programming language. Some applications that functions as basic service, are still being developed incorporated with the Internal Portal project itself. In addition, current Internal Portal has some page types, they are as follows: News Page, Personal Page, and Custom HTML Page.

News Page is a type of page that contains some news about the company and global news. There is also information about upcoming company events inside the News Page. Personal page is a type of page that is customizable for each employee’s preference. Employees can fill this Personal Page with some applications listed. Unlike News Page, this page is managed personally and cannot be seen by other employees. Custom HTML Page is a type of page that contains HTML tags about news or other informations depending on the needs.

One of factor that causes the quick growth of technology is the increasing use of mobile device. When it comes to opening application in mobile device, the device size and resolution is an issue to be noticed. The issue emerges due to many different screen sizes and resolutions. Imagine having to scroll a desktop-view sized application in a mobile phone, it would really take a lot of time and effort to do a single task and navigation. Thus a responsive web design is needed to handle this issue that can adapt like a fluid to any screen size and resolutions. However, the current Internal Portal is not responsive and it relates with the issue due to the increasing mobile device use.

Furthermore, in the implementation environment, the current Internal Portal project still needs code refactoring because some features that should have been separated to different modules and integrated with Internal Portal, were implemented inside the Internal Portal project as a whole project. Besides, as Business Technology department at Djarum Group has been migrating to Java programing language for the last two years, the department considers that a new Java-based Internal Portal should be developed with a modernized design and some additional features by using the latest technologies.

Concurrently in database environment, NoSQL movement has been starting to rise since 2012. It was first started by the needs of Web 2.0 companies, such as: Facebook, Google, and Amazone, in 2005. NoSQL stands for Not Only SQL; in a brief, it is a mechanism in database for storage and retrieval of data modeled in different way rather than relational databases (SQL) with the objectives of flexibility and simplicity of design, dealing with big data, and the needs of real time. A list of other big companies such as: Twitter, Adobe, LinkedIn, PayPal, and many others have been known for using NoSQL as their storage for handling big data problem. Although relational database is still used by lots of developers around the world, it not impossible that one day it will be replaced by NoSQL movement as the growth of big data that increases each year. That being said, the department also initiates to start joining NoSQL movement in order to synchronize the latest technology in database environment.