We are in the later stages of a project with the FM Network which has been described by some of our competitors as impossible to achieve! Because we always like a challenge we said we would take on this project on a no-success, no-payment approach – if we can’t do it then you don’t pay us!
The FM Network are an organisation on a mission, a mission to further maths education in schools and colleges. They have developed a range of bespoke learning tools that allow centres around the country to improve the teaching of maths and to track the progress of the students, but sadly it ran into a problem – a self made one.
Because so many schools and colleges are naturally concerned about security they only allowed a few trusted applications running in the schools to communicate with the outside world. Unfortunately the FM Network’s applications were not allowed to communicate with the database servers located outside of the school’s firewalls. So how do you get an application that is not allowed to communicate with the outside world to break the rules, without breaching security?
Using a large helping of innovative spirit we discovered that web browsers were allowed through the firewall, so if we could trick the firewall into thinking the FM Application was actually a web browser we could make it work. We built a web service externally from the schools and colleges that would appear as a web server to all concerned, but in fact it was actually disguising the database server behind it. The FM Network application was then modified to send web requests through the firewall to which our web service treated as database instructions. The required data was then extracted and converted into a web compliant format and sent back to the application.
Pretty straightforward really! Of course, everyone’s life could have been made easier if the schools trusted the FM Network application, but then again we do like a challenge!
