Sprint Nextel engaged Mersoft to provide a dynamic web application for their CDMA Address Book solution.  The Address Book gives Sprint customers the ability to manage their phone contacts through a Sprint web application with enhanced functionality enabling customers to synchronize their web contacts with the contacts on their mobile phone. The solution is a highly complex and scalable system touching numerous large back office systems and supporting millions of users.  It provides an array of features specifically for business customers to manage contact templates and integrates with Sprint’s “Push to Talk” instant communication capability.

The Address Book software is a multi-tiered solution with many new and innovative architectural approaches delivered together to produce a solid and flexible framework that handles new features and functionality easily.  The solution incorporates a sophisticated web-based Model-View-Control (MVC) architecture that enables the system to support three main usage scenarios without duplicating code and functionality. The solution is designed to be highly distributed and scalable utilizing geographical diversity and node clustering.

Mersoft responsibilities for this project covered the whole Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC) and included the following: User Experience (user interface layouts and associated graphical interactions), Business Requirements, System Requirements, System Design, System Development, Testing, Install, and Warranty.

Mission

  • Engineer a multi-sourced mobile address book system for Sprint that communicates with several network systems and provider back-office systems to bring a contact mash-up to customers

Plan of attack

  • Design the system to be highly distributed and scalable using geographical diversity and node clustering
  • Provide customers with a Web-based view of their mobile phone address content
  • Allow syncing between on-line information and mobile information
  • Use IBM WebSphere, Java, Spring, Struts, vCard, XML, SOAP, REST, and SOA principles

The impact

  • The Address Book gives Sprint customers the ability to manage their phone contacts through a Sprint Web application with enhanced functionality to synchronize the Web contacts with mobile phone contacts
  • The solution is a highly complex and scalable system touching numerous back office systems and supporting millions of users per month
  • This was phase two of a very critical upgrade to Sprint’s capabilities and crucial in helping transition Nextel customers to the Sprint network