Industry

  • Publishing

Services

  • Backend software architecture
  • Backend software development

Technologies

  • C# 8.0
  • .NET Framework 4.8
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • SQL Server
  • Windows Services
  • Azure Service Bus and Azure Functions
  • Apache Solr Server
  • Azure DevOps

Founded in 1770, Gyldendal is the oldest and largest publishing house in Denmark, offering a wide selection of fiction and non-fiction books. Thousands of readers across Denmark and the broader Scandinavian region are members of the Gyldendals Bogklubber: an easy way of discovering and devouring new and interesting books.

Keeping in mind the novel digital design trends, Gyldendal wanted to create a new face for the website of Gyldendals Bogklubber. They also wanted to use their new e-commerce platform as the main building block of the website. All of this required the development of a new backend system, which could not only support the integration with various new and old systems, but also provide reliable uptime for the large number of users.

Our engineering solution for the new backend system consisted of:

  1. Integration with a third-party e-commerce system: We designed and developed a REST API, which is responsible for all the critical and non-critical business functionality, including but not limited to CRUD operations of important business entities, order processing, data synchronizations, etc.
  2. Design and development of new data pipelines, and their integration with Gyldendal’s existing infrastructure.
  3. Creation of a new system for primarily managing the user login information, consisting of a REST API and an SQL database, and its integration with different existing and new systems.
  4. Design and development of a platform for asynchronous processing of Orders and other long running tasks, consisting of 24/7 running jobs, and web UIs for internal users. The platform is based on the concepts of durable tasks and uses Azure services like Service Bus and Table storage.
  5. Creation of a new 24/7 running service to interface with a legacy ‘Interactive Voice Response’ system, for order placement.

Results

Increased membership and revenue

The new system architecture helped facilitate the members of the book clubs in easily finding and discussing their books, which resulted in increased memberships and thus revenue.

Better and maintainable software architecture

The revamped architecture combined with the newly developed enhancements greatly reduced the time to fix bugs, and provided a solid structure for introducing new features.