What is involved in building a site like this?

This site provides financial information to policy holders of Security First Group, a Met Life subsidiary. Security First Group provides life insurance policies and other financial services to consumers.

Multiple Brand Identities

SFG provides policies in 4 states under 4 names: Security First Group, Tennessee Deferred Compensation, Florida Sunshine, and Texa$aver; in order for this site to serve all four markets, it had to be “brand-able”, i.e., to take on a different look and feel for each market. Yet it also had to be built quickly, and maintained easily. In order to do this, we designed the site to have programmable headers and footers, along with graphics that were based upon the site identity. In this manner, we were able to use one common set of code to achieve the four different colors and logos.

In addition, bankers wanted the site to be branded with their specific logos. Therefore, the site also offers custom branding so that when the banks link to the site with their bank ID#, the logos appear with the bank logo as well.

Technical Challenges

Mainframe to Microsoft SQL Server

The customer data is located in VSAM flat files on the mainframe. These files were based on legacy systems, and included data and inputs from systems that had been modified in COBOL over many years. One of our technical challenges was to load the data from the mainframe into Microsoft SQL Server in such a way that it was useful to us.

To accomplish this, we had the mainframes programmers do a flat file extract that resulted in as much as a gigabyte of data each day. Then a set of SQL DTS packages polled a file gateway. When the files were available, they are loaded into SQL Server.

24 x 7 availability

The availability requirements for the site are 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. In order to support this, we needed redundant hardware, routers, firewalls and database servers. In addition, the database server processes are designed to maintain an active copy of data, even during the time-consuming daily load procedures. The data tables are “flipped” once a day to activate the new values.

Business Rules

The business rules called for complex calculations for allocation and transfer effective change dates. Additionally, complex rules for determining the types of transfers, allocation changes and amounts are encapsulated in Visual Basic classes stored in a local server COM object. All SQL statements were placed in Visual Basic objects; stored procedures are used to access all tables.

Security

At the launch of this site, the policyholders were notified of the service availability. They then could go to the site and register on line after providing unique identification information. A client-side Visual Basic application was run each day to generate a confirmation letter to new users.

Internally, the site uses strong encryption within and between pages, and for any information passed from page to page. SSL encryption also protects the user from unauthorized snooping.

Externally, the site is hosted on hardened servers behind firewalls with intrusion detection.

Features

Some of the features of this site are:

What technologies are used on this site?

Production

Microsoft NT 4.0
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0
Microsoft SQL Server 7.0
WebTrends Enterprise Suite

Mainframe & Legacy Systems

COBOL
AWD
MAPS
Vantage
TrustMark

Development

Visual Basic 6.0
Visual InterDev 6.0
DreamWeaver 3.0
Visio 4.0
ERwin 3.5

Components

ASPEMail
ASPEncrypt
Mabry Internet Controls
Macromedia Flash
Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC 2.5)
FarPoint Data Controls
InstallShield Express

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