DCTR

Bespoke .NET Development hosted in Azure

DCTR, formerly Doctor Photo, specialise in retouching, CGI & design for estate agents, developers, retirement home providers & Housing Associations - fueling their property marketing with irresistible visuals.

The bespoke Doctor Photo platform was developed by a third party and serves for easy image upload and management, fast communication with clients and partners, and monthly invoice reports.

Dolphin IT Solutions took over the project several years ago and have since integrated it with Xero, expanded their services and made various functionality and design improvements.

At the end of 2020, the application had significantly slowed down due to the architecture not being able to support that much larger amounts of data.

The Solution

Our professionals at Dolphin IT Solutions recommended a full platform rebuild in the latest version of .NET. The proposed solution aimed to modernize the platform architecture and optimise its performance as the userbase inevitably keeps expanding, and create the opportunity for introducing even more features, to which DCTR happily agreed.

The expert .NET developers at Dolphin IT Solutions rebuilt the system from the ground up in accordance with the new design provided by the client, which involved completely retouching both the user and admin side. The core functionality stayed the same, with the big additions of inbox and most importantly, Bob's AI Edits, which instantly enhance uploaded photos and are immediately available for download. Furthermore, we used Azure Functions to carry out the AI functionality in the background, which has considerably reduced the waiting time.

Considering the cost and flexibility requirements, Dolphin IT Solutions decided to host the platform entirely on Azure using a range of services. The DCTR platform is hosted on a web service using both Azure SQL & blob storage as the data source - Azure Functions to carry out background tasks, and Event Grids to trigger the AI Functionality.