The Griffin App — Axway AMPLIFY Platform with a side of Awesome

Like so many companies, Axway is rising to the challenges involved in slowly opening offices around the world. Ensuring everything is planned responsibly and in a way that continues to make the safety of Axway Griffins (Axway team members) our number one priority.

To assist in the implementation of our carefully executed plan, we realized the need for a tool to help Axway Griffins with scheduling any office visits.

The Griffin App

We were already working on plans for having an Axway Mobile App available for all employees and this was the perfect opportunity to launch and provide assistance to our team members.

The first major feature going into the Griffin App was to be an Office Scheduling assistant, and it needed to be able to do the following:

• Allow Admin to set/change the normal max capacity for an office.
• Allow Admin to set/change the capacity for an office for a closed date range (i.e. 25% capacity from July 15, 2020 to July 30, 2020).
• Allow Admin to set/change capacity for an office for an open date range (i.e. 30% capacity from July 31, 2020 forward).
• Allow an employee to see the current and scheduled capacity for an office on a given date.
• Allow an employee to schedule themselves for an office visit on a given date (or date range).
• Allow an employee to remove a scheduled office visit on a given date (or date range).
• Allow an employee to get a visual view of the office schedule for the current (or future) month.
• Allow an employee to get a 30-day visual view of office capacities for a selected office.
• Allow an employee to see scheduled team members (who agreed to share the schedule) for a selected office.
• Allow an employee to choose the primary office (but allow switching to a different office) for scheduling.
• App and APIs needed to be secured by OAuth SSO.
• Mobile app needed for both iOS and Android devices.
• Mobile app needed to be able to check for updates and update itself (as much as possible with native platform).
• Allow Admin to recommend or force users to update to newer versions of the mobile app if necessary.
• Provide a dashboard for executives to see status, capacities, and history for any office location.

Great! Sounds simple enough, right?

But our Axway Griffin Innovation Lab was up for the challenge and partnered with our Developer Evangelism team to start working!

AMPLIFY Platform

Luckily, we also have the incredible AMPLIFY™ Platform available to us here at Axway! We were able to create a plan to meet the tight date requirements by leveraging the power of the Axway AMPLIFY platform!

• Create a cross-platform native mobile app for iOS and Android using AMPLIFY™ Titanium.
• Create APIs using AMPLIFY™ API Builder.
• Use AMPLIFY Integration Builder to easily integrate with any third-party APIs.
• Store data in AMPLIFY Mobile Backend Services (MBS).
• Secure any and all APIs with AMPLIFY Central.
• Host our APIs using AMPLIFY Runtime Services.

We created an OpenAPI 3.0 design spec for our APIs and got to work designing, prototyping, developing, testing, releasing our APIs using AMPLIFY API Builder. We then turned around and used AMPLIFY Titanium to build an awesome app for iOS and Android!

One of the hidden benefits of using AMPLIFY API Builder (Node.js) and AMPLIFY Titanium (JavaScript) together was that we were able to take advantage of a lot of code sharing between the two projects!

Well, after a few busy weeks of development and testing with our super beta testers, we were ready to unveil the office scheduling feature to all of our Axway Griffins!

SSO Authentication was used so that all Axway Griffins could authenticate using their Axway credentials. We used OAuth 2.0 JavaScript libraries to handle token management.

(We also integrated some pretty cool Lottie animations into the app for loading screens!)

Users are able to select their primary office location but are also able to change locations in case a situation requires a visit to a different office location.

The main screen of the initial version of the app is focused on the Office Scheduling feature and allows users to see their currently selected office stats for today, as well as get a quick view of the next 7 days. Users can also change their selected office (if needed).

It was also important that users be able to easily see which days were already at capacity or otherwise unavailable for schedule when planning their office visit.

Office administrators can also edit office details such as capacity limits for a selected office. Limits are also based on date ranges because all office locations will only open when safe and those numbers could go up or down based on local factors or government regulations.

Additionally, we were able to integrate into a consolidated feed of the latest Axway news! We used Microsoft Teams as the community home for conversations about the app and its use so we included a link that allowed users to open up that team right from the app.

There are other features that we’ve added (and continue to add!) to the mobile app and APIs as we provide more ways for Axway Griffins to engage with one another during this time.

A word of caution though: Working with Axway AMPLIFY products is addicting, and it only gets stronger with every integration you create!