The first application the Client App team started to work on was the task of rebuilding the core of Shareowner Online, a shareholder portal, used by more than 1 million users with online access worldwide. On the technical side, it is an application written in .NET Framework connected with React, which integrates heavily with Umbraco CMS. For many of us, this CMS was a new thing; looking from the longer perspective, we were able to get to know Umbraco pretty well. In the end, we took over the responsibilities of 5 existing teams in different physical locations to ownership of a single Client App team based in EQ Tek hub.
Robert Kesek
IT Director
After first successes with the Shareowner Online team focused on the development of a different application from EQ US portfolio – Asset Reunification. It is an application based on a completely different tech profile – oriented to backend data processing. We can even call it ETL. Asset Reunification process files have more than 5 million records applying advanced logic in .NET Core and using advanced SQL Server functionalities like merge. Application is deployed in Docker containers which was another interesting technology to get to know. From May to October 2020 team delivered a total of 440 items in 5 releases to Production, partnering closely with the end-user business team.
At the end of 2020, our team had the opportunity to deliver POC of application which was written in a completely new approach, with .NET 5, Azure Cloud with REST API, supported by Azure AD B2C. The application was great in its role; thanks to that, 2021 will be full of exciting changes in existing products.
After working with people in UK and US, we’ve learned a lot of interesting things. Sometimes we needed to stay late working on the problems, which gave the team a lot of interesting acquaintances and mutual respect.
Looking back, a lot changed since the early days of the Client App. In the beginning, we had Team Foundation Version Control, and today, after a road full of challenges, we switched to GIT. We started working on Virtual Machines; now we are working on our company laptops. Additionally, we were able to switch to Azure DevOps Server 2020, which is now the main tool for all US applications.