United eWay

Architecture Overview Click Here for Printable Version

United eWay Campaign Management is an online pledge capture system designed to the administration of giving campaigns. Campaign Management is available to companies to streamline the configuration, deployment, reporting, data capture, and personalization needs of employee giving campaigns. Campaign Management is a highly customized and dynamic interface to giving, accessible from any web browser over the internet.
	At the highest level, the system is comprised of two primary components: the donor site and the administrative site. The donor site encompasses the features that an individual donor with an organization would see as they complete their giving experience. The administrative site encompasses all the functionality required to configure a highly personalized and customized suite of web sites to meet an individual companies needs. The administrative site provides real time access to manage donations made and to run real time reports on campaign progress. The application infrastructure is based on Microsoft's .NET technology with storage provided by SQL Server. The overall architecture of Campaign Management solution is composed of three independent layers, depicted to the left is what we call the "Kite Model": Presentation Layer - Responsible for all user interface presented to both donors and administrators Business Layer - Encapsulates the overall business rules to support the needs of diverse campaigns. The business layer is comprised of business objects which represent real world entities modeled in the application (e.g. a Donor) and business services which provide structured access to key reports (e.g. the list of all credit card donors). Data Layer - Provides secure and consistent access to the data store supported by SQL Server
An additional cross functional tier, which we call the common layer, provides a set of underlying components to tie the three layers together. This multiple tier architecture provides a clear delineation of user interface, business rules, and persistent while providing for an application that is easy to extend and easy to scale. Client Access to the Campaign Management Solution Clients interact with the Campaign Management application via a web browser. We recommend using the latest version of either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. User Authentication occurs using non-identifiable session cookies which are only in effect until they expire or the user closers his or her browser. The application does not require any additional plug-ins or applets. All requests to Campaign Management occur over HTTPS. Your environment is required to have connectivity to the internet and to allow https connections to our set of IP addresses. United eWay uses standard unicast messaging from server to server and does not use IP broadcasting or multicasting for the core electronic pledge capture system. Application Layer The majority of United eWay's Campaign Management solution runs on Microsoft Windows Server, versions 2000 and 2003, with versions 1.1 and 2.0 of the .NET framework, using the C# programming language. All software running on Microsoft is deployed through IIS (Internet Information Server). All requests are served overB SSL (Port 443) to ensure the encryption of data in transit. Services are deployed on an Intel PC based servers. The search components of Campaign Management are deployed on a dedicated cluster with Linux and Java Server technologies. Database Layer Production databases are SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. We deploy an advanced replication scheme to create a reliable cluster dedicated to reports. Replication is managed via the Microsoft Cluster Service. Each reporting database server runs SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition. All data are stored in an ACID compliant relational database. All databases are either deployed in live clusters. Read only database servers are deployed in active clusters supporting read operations from any server in the cluster. Read/Write operations occur on one primary, dedicated database server in an active/passive configuration. If this primary database were to fail, the passive database server would replace it in production. Access to data is provided through the vendor administration tools and controlled via specific user privileges either being "granted" or "denied" to individual users of he system. Primary Application Components The Campaign Management system is composed of multiple applications: OPPS - Online Pledge Processing System, or commonly referred to as the administrative site. Administrators interact with OPPS to configure campaigns and to report on their progress. OPCS - Online Pledge Capture System, or commonly referred to as the donor site. Donors interact with OPCS to make their gifts online. QPPI - Quick Pledge Processing Interface. Administrators use QPPI to enter information from paper pledge cards as batch donations. This interface is designed to streamline the data entry of large volumes of data. A utility service provides the management and processing of batch donations within QPPI. This utility provides a series of additional validation on the donation data prior to incorporate the pledges in the corresponding campaign configured in OPPS. This ensures an easy to manage paper pledge process that provides integrated reporting for campaigns using both online and paper access. OPCSSSO - Online Pledge Capture System Single Sign On. This is an application dedicated to the processing of single sign on requests, devoted primarily to supporting the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard. MGCS - Matching Grant Capture System. This application provides an interface for donors to submit matching grant requests for companies utilizing the Matching Grants Management System. Note that the configuration of MGCS is fully integrated as part of OPPS. Track - Dedicated application focused on donation tracking. Gifts distributed by United eWay can be easily tracked online to view the status of payments. Additional Technologies Campaign Management makes light uses of JavaScript and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) technologies to provide for greater interactivity with the donor. Any critical feature dependant on these technologies is deployed with an option for non supporting browsers. A dedicated service is responsible for sending all emails specified within the Campaign Management solution. Email messages are based on highly customizable email templates which provide access to dynamic content via hundreds of donor and donation specific variables. At regular intervals, the OPPS application merges email templates with donor and donation information to create a set of emails targeted to donors. Each time a donation is captured through OPCS, a confirmation email, also based on a template, may be created. The email service monitors all emails to ensure reliable delivery to the recipient.