Companies who grow with multiple branches in different geographical locations, could benefit from using a web based secure intranet in order to stay connected and exchange valuable business information.

The Loan Processing Terminal and Intranet, was an in-house research & development project inspired by a request once submitted to rmd Studio. In the beginning, the intention was to develop just a prototype, surprisingly the end product turned out to be as good as a production quality web application.

Objective

The objective was to develop a two-in-one web based loan processing terminal and intranet for an imaginary Financial Services Company called “The Bottomless Pit”. This company provides loans to the qualified applicants.

Bottomless Pit has a main office and multiple branches all over the country.
A branch collects and stores applicants’ personal information. Submitted loan applications stay in a queue until they get reviewed and approved ( or rejected ) by the main office, then the results are sent back to the branch of origin.

This intranet also functions as a platform for administrating branch representatives’ user accounts, as well as a communication channel for sending out company’s internal newsletters.

Development Platform

The development platform used was Joomla! CMS . This application provided a modular and object oriented architecture which could be extended to suit our project.

Joomla could also cater the following features:

• User Management
• Access Control ListTemplate Management
• Content Management
• Menu Management
• Ability to install/uninstall custom extensions ( components, and modules )

Challenges

Security was the first main concern. This was an environment that stored personal and financial information, therefore The following security measures were considered in the design:

• SSL secure connections for all the communication that happened between the terminals and the main server.
• Firewalls to further secure the terminals.
• In order to prevent web browsers to directly access the images, all the uploaded image files were stored outside the root directory of the web application.
• User account passwords were encrypted then stored.

The other challenge was developing more intuitive user interface elements for the online forms. The default Joomla! 1.0 API was not sufficient enough for that purpose, although we could have improved this matter by incorporating AJAX and DHMTL technologies into our web application.