Project Summary and Client Background
When Wind Creek Hospitality began a website development project for their new property located in Montgomery, Alabama, they partnered with a third party development team and soon after beginning the project they realized that this project required a technology partner with the expertise to bring all the pieces together including cloud hosting, and website integration with booking engine – they called long-time partner Bit-Wizards to manage all aspects of the project and perform the integration and configuration pieces of the project.
The Challenge
The challenges of this project were varied. Bit-Wizards took on the role of technology advisement, project management, and integration and testing. This position meant that the Bit-Wizards team would bridge the gaps between the Wind Creek teams and the third party vendors.
Working closely with the vendors to ensure successful integration, and also working with the internal teams at Wind Creek, Bit-Wizards took responsibility for the timeline and project milestone goals. This project would include implementation and configuration of a
booking engine solution that Bit-Wizards previously developed for a separate Wind Creek property, the set-up of a new Kentico three-tier hosting environment, development of a
media distribution tool for video streaming while integrating all of that with front-end development.
The Solution
The solution developed brings together a complete website solution for Wind Creek which began with the set-up and configuration of a new Kentico environment in
Microsoft Azure. Visual Studio online was also set up to share the code base across the development teams and also to allow for deployment cycles.
The Bit-Wizards team then built a
media streaming solution on Microsoft Azure Media Services and integrated it into the website. The previous booking engine solution was upgraded and migrated into the Kentico 8.2.48 environment and integrated into the new site’s designs. Along with all of this, the Bit-Wizards project management team coordinated with Wind Creek IT and the third-party vendors Opera and Ballys to make certain needed resources were online and thoroughly tested to support the new instance of the booking engine. Then lastly, the site was thoroughly tested and deployed.
The Result
This website successfully supports the newly opened Montgomery property with all the functionality necessary for customers to book room nights, explore the amenities, and thanks to the video streaming functionality, they also experience what it feels like to be at Wind Creek the minute they hit the home page.
This project launched on time (8-week timeframe) and was a success for all parties involved. Once again the Wind Creek team was pleased to have Bit-Wizards bridge the technology language gap for them with third party vendors and also utilize their in-house skill to execute necessary development, integration, and configuration tasks to keep the project moving forward to meet the launch date.