We saw this project as a classic case of "Make System A talk to System B". This would be primarily a software project, but support would be important too — if the software stops working, the sales pipeline gets interrupted and that is bad for business.

Software

The software has many features but it was built with a few important components:

MLS Collector

Communicates with the MLS server at regular intervals and collects properties that match certain criteria.

Web Control Panel

Web application for active monitoring and control of important system settings.

SalesForce Pusher

Checks existing data in SalesForce and performs automated insertion and updating of SalesForce object records.

Cloud Hosted

This project introduced an important constraint: low latency data capturing. This requirement drove our decision to deploy the software to the cloud with Microsoft Azure™. Cloud hosting provides several benefits:

Geographic Diversity

Being able to locate the software in a data center with the shortest path to our third party services means lower latency.

Ease of Migration

If network conditions deteriorate between nodes, we can migrate to a different data center.

Cost Savings

With proper configuration and provisioning, cloud hosted virtual machines can save money.

Support

With the software sitting at the center of an important sales pipeline, reliability and stability are key. To that end, we took the following steps:

Support Ticket Tracking

We use a ticketing system to track every support request from the time it is reported to the time it is resolved.

Pro-active Monitoring

Using a combination of Microsoft Azure™ monitoring tools and proprietary software monitoring, we are able to predict and correct most problems before they become showstoppers.

RE/MAX Exclusive Collection uses this software to stay ahead of competitors, reduce human error and generate additional sales.