ENEX
ENEX is a cooperative global news provider, leveraging the collective newsgathering strengths of its 55 members. ENEX members share their news content, around 40.000 stories per year, and their news production resources. ENEX holds permanent satellite capacity for use by members.
THE CHALLENGE
Having used a complex Satellite Bookings Scheduling system for nearly 20 years, we needed to get away from it as it is heavily dependent on ageing on premise server hardware turning into a roadblock and maintenance headache regarding the transformation of our workflows towards a cloud based server-less infrastructure and the goal to outsource hosting and support to the platform providers.
We indeed faced difficult challenges during the Covid period with the old setup as the system made it hard to manage operations with most of the team working from home office.
THE SOLUTION
farmerswife turned out to be closest we could get on the market regarding a similar resource scheduling timeline experience in the cloud compared to the previous platform to enable the smoothest transition experience possible for our users.
A crucial required component was a well documented API matching our integration requirements for data import out of the previous platform and export to a new cloud hosted custom application based on Laravel MVC framework based controllers.
Following several weeks of API testing in our new cloud, farmerswife gave us the answer to be a very suitable product to replace our satellite and fibre resources booking workflows in the cloud, especially after several feature upgrades we recommended were implemented.
farmerswife is actually not designed per default to deal with scheduling of satellite or fiber resources like the previous system, but with the assistance of farmerswife support, we are able to define a very efficient configuration and during the numerous and occasionally heavy workload tests, the cloud server setup never failed.
We appreciate the availability of client & server software for all operation systems and even a mobile app which are easy and quickly to upgrade. This was exactly what we were looking for, as maintenance and upgrades became a big issue on the previous system due to complex hardware and server dependencies.
Another advantage is the performance bonus of a native application / cloud server combination like farmerswife offers compared to a pure cloud setup is considerable.
THE SUPPORT
For over a year, we worked closely with farmerswife to find the optimal platform setup to match our very specific needs. farmerswife gave us all the time we needed to properly evaluate various approaches and test the API before committing to the platform. The contact and communication with farmerswife support was and still is a great experience.
Our feedback regarding missing feature requests was quickly and professionally implemented by the farmerswife development team. As we participate in the BETA program, several of our recommendations will be part of the next version upgrade hopefully making the platform more powerful and flexible for all customers.
