Some details
Situation
Shoosmiths is one of the UK’s fastest-growing national law firms.
HM Courts and Tribunals Service had implemented a new Secure Data Transfer (SDT) gateway to streamline the submission of money claims. As a result Shoosmiths were required to put in place integration between their two existing case management systems – Visualfiles &, IDR – and the HMCTS SDT system.
The solution
would need to accommodate both Shoosmiths’ operational processes together with the HMCTS implementation. To achieve this, changes were required within Shoosmiths’ internal systems, in parallel to Ballard Chalmers creating the SDT solution interface.
Solution
Shoosmiths chose to implement Microsoft BizTalk as an integration engine (which will later also be extended to support the firm’s Enterprise Service Bus).
Shoosmiths needed assistance from a Microsoft Partner organisation that could rapidly get to grips with the firm’s requirements and could deliver a scalable solution in a very short timescale.
The solution was based on BizTalk Server 2013 and the BizTalk ESB Toolkit. The ESB resides between the Line of Business (LOB) systems and the SDT system, and has the capability to act in real time or in batches with respect to both incoming and outgoing messages.
The HMCTS SDT is a real time Web Service based system. Shoosmiths have two internal LOB claims systems, one used by 80% of the users and one by 20%. Neither of these systems have built-in sophisticated integration capabilities therefore the methods of interchange are:
- Incoming and outgoing communication handled by files being placed into a drop folder.
- Incoming and outgoing calls made through staging tables in a SQL database.
Outcome
“The integration with HMCTS is critical to our business. In the short timescales available, the easy option would have been to develop a specific point solution, adding yet more complexity to our systems landscape. Instead, the use of BizTalk provides us with flexibility to enhance the solution as the integration with HMCTS evolves, whilst being able to extend the use of this service to other parts of the business if required. Ballard Chalmers did an excellent job of delivering exactly what we required, when we required it. I was impressed by how quickly they understood the legal process and were able to deliver a flexible, yet scalable solution that can keep pace as our business grows.” - Andrew Souter
