Briefing Automation Software that Improved Business Efficiency and Flexibility

Summary

A US business intelligence company prepared its client briefings entirely by hand, a time-consuming process. INNERLUXES automated it with three interrelated modules — a Chrome extension that parses HTML pages and their metatags into briefings, a multifunctional PHP/Symfony briefing editor deployed on AWS, and a back-end admin panel for user and recipient management with viral-content and email-delivery integrations — improving the company's efficiency and flexibility.

About the Client

The Client is a US business intelligence company helping executives and managers make data-driven decisions under time pressure. The Client's specialists capture information about industries and companies from trustworthy media resources and present it to customers as daily or weekly briefings sent by email.

The Challenge

The Client's briefing preparation process was completely manual and rather time-consuming. The Client wanted to parse HTML pages with a dedicated Chrome extension and automatically create briefings from the information found. A back-end web administrator panel was required to organize user and recipient management. The Client also wanted to organize effective briefing distribution and viral information acquisition, and needed a cloud database to manage and store its growing array of briefings.

The Solution

The project comprised the following interrelated modules:

Chrome extension

INNERLUXES delivered a Chrome extension to automate briefing creation. It parses information from relevant HTML pages such as news posts, automatically captures the metatags they contain, and displays them in a briefing window — including post title, URL, author, publication date, media contribution, and other key details. The team added context-menu options that let users capture the summary and comments they previously highlighted on a page, which then also appear in the briefing window. INNERLUXES also enabled parsing of Twitter account names and handles, displayed in the media contribution section when a news post comes from Twitter.

Briefing editor

INNERLUXES developed a multifunctional web application for editing briefings. It lets users combine articles under a selected tag name, reorder them, preview, save, and send. The team made several fields manually editable, such as Summary and Tags, so briefing specialists can correct or expand the summary and change tags. INNERLUXES optimized the UI for the latest version of Chrome, deployed the solution to the Amazon cloud, and ensured compatibility with the most popular browsers and mobile devices.

Back end

INNERLUXES created a web administrator panel for effective user and recipient management, so only authorized administrators can work with the briefing editor and assign privileges to new users and recipient groups. The team also optimized back-end data storage and carried out BuzzSumo and SendGrid integrations to facilitate acquiring viral information and delivering briefings through the cloud-based platform, respectively.

The Results

• The Client got a Chrome extension to parse HTML pages and create briefings automatically, plus a web application for editing them.
• The web administrator panel was developed for user and recipient management.
• The Client improved its business processes, increased efficiency, and gained greater flexibility to parse and process information from HTML pages relevant to its customers.

Technologies and Tools

Chrome extension: JavaScript, Gulp, npm.

Briefing editor: jQuery UI, TinyMCE, JavaScript, PHP, Symfony.

Back end: PHP, Symfony, MySQL.