The Operations Room personnel is responsible for monitoring of the ATM public transport lines in urban and suburban areas of the city of Milan. Whether vehicle drivers call for an intervention of the Operations Room, the operators contact and assist the drivers at work.

Finsoft has developed the "Operations Room Journal " application: a system based on the latest Microsoft technologies and integrated with already existing infrastructures within the ATM Spa Information Direction.

Client-side application is based on Microsoft. Net Framework 4.0: more specifically, all the GUIs have been developed on the Windows Presentation Foundation, while the remote calls are managed through the Windows Communication Foundation.

For server-side application, that handles the integration with other enterprise systems, Windows 2003/2008 server was used. The last exposes Web Services based on Windows Communication Foundation through IIS Web Server. The programming language used for the development of all the applications is C #.

For software life-cycle management and for system development such Microsoft products as Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server were used. To provide users having diverse level of experience, the software solution provides also the OVD tool (Operator Virtual Desktop). This, according to the user profile (BR, BG, Coordinator SO), displays or not several specific characteristics.

To optimize the application response time, the system uses a local client-side cache, thus delimiting communications with servers to only transactions requiring online.

To provide a simpler and more intuitive user experience, application user-friendly icons are used for event state identification. Moreover, for a clearer application interface (e.g. display and selection of external links), the particular method is used: by pointing the mouse over a "hot zone", a pop-up menu with all the available options appears. In compliance with SOA standards, the system is composed of modules made of atomic, vertically oriented services.

The two level system design has brought some benefits to system maintenance: any change within a certain function does not impact on other modules and reduces, therefore, development and testing time.

The choice of a two-level infrastructure allows to separate user interface and client logic from server logic and integration interfaces with other services. This makes the application scalable, both horizontally and vertically. Particular attention was paid to the implementation of Web Services dedicated to the events flows management. For this purpose, MS WF was used: Workflows compatible with BizTalk have been developed.

The OVD application, that exploits the WPF features, has been developed to manage the proprietary rules (such as mandatory fields) through specific configurations that simplify any future change to be applied to those.