Case Study: Delta Informatique

Delta Informatique is the company behind Delta Bank, one of the most widespread core banking system in the world. Our customers include the largest financial institutions of the European Union but also medium to small sized banks. Considering the span of different transactions our system covers keeping an up to date documentation is a primary concern for our customers, especially taken into account that the same information should be rendered in a different way according to the medium (core banking help system, HTML, PDF...) and to the reader (end-users, business managers but also application managers and IT departments).

Description of the challenge:

While Delta Informatique has been making use of Oxygen XML Editor for some years now, we decided to make it one of our primary tools for an ambitious project we had this year in Albania. Societe Generale asked us to replace the existing system of their Albanian subsidiary, Banka Popullore, by the latest version of Delta Bank in less than ten months. Considering that Albania is one of the latest European country where there is still no financial institution running Delta Bank, and that such project usually takes between 12 and 18 months we knew we had focus our energy on business analysis (Albania is a very special country in terms of Central Bank regulation compared to the EU), on adaptations of our core banking system and spare as much efforts as possible on documentation.

How this affected your company?

As a consequence we had to implement a documentation system that :

Would be standards compliant (W3C, Oasis, Unicode...)
Would be cross-platforms (our technical consultants are used to Windows / Linux while our business consultants are used to Windows / Mac OS X)
Would include versioning
Would store its source files in a XML database
Would not require a long learning curve
Would be easy to maintain
Would fit in our budget

What made you choose Oxygen?

All in all, only Oxygen really meets all of these criteria and even add on top of it a French translation and efficient email support.

How do you describe the selection process?

We managed to build in a few days, our documentation solution (Oxygen on client side, Apache Subversion^TM + eXist + Apache Ant + XEP on server side) thanks to the seamless integration of Oxygen with eXist and XEP, and the 'Neat' Subversion client developed by Syncro Soft.

This set-up worked like a charm during the whole project (almost no maintenance) and allowed us to spend our efforts on the documentation content / translation (English / French / Albanian). In these 10 months we produced multiple thousands pages of content, our attention solely dedicated to the quality of the information and not distracted by cross-platforms, page layout, or versioning questions.

How good was Oxygen in solving your problem?

While using Oxygen as our documentation editor was our primary aim, it quickly became obvious that this application was embraced by our team for uses different than we had planned.

Our consultants used it to prototype XML files generated by our core banking system while staying in their favorite development tool (thanks to the Oxygen plugin for Eclipse), used the Oxygen SFTP capabilities to edit config files or shell scripts on remote AIX servers or to do some diffs between files / folders of the nodes of the AIX clusters. Actually it became some kind of Emacs: an application that you always leave running on your computer to handle your common tasks.

Describe the benefits after using Oxygen in your company:

In conclusion Banka Popullore went live with Delta Bank 9.1 the 20th of October 2009, in time and in budget, proving the flexibility and the maturity of our core banking system and of our implementation methods.

There is no doubt that Oxygen XML Editor was a key element of this success and we look forward to use it on our next projects.