Date of Award

Fall 12-1-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS)

First Advisor

Christopher Olson

Second Advisor

Ronghua Shan

Third Advisor

Zixing Shen

Abstract

Secure Page allows IBM customer problem management applications to send mobile push notifications to technical support members for new work items. The current method of using simple SMS text to provide paging capabilities is limited in usage and is not a secure method for transmitting confidential information to the recipient. Relying on SMS text is also unreliable with no method to trace a failure. Project Secure Page builds a new method for offering secure and reliable notifications to the end users. Secure Page provides a web service provider for accepting and building push notifications, an underlying database to log all transactions, and a mobile device app that receives the push notifications on Android and iOS platforms. Research was conducted looking at different methods to handle push notifications for both mobile platforms as well as combined solutions that provide notification services. External companies have solutions that manage the entire end to end problem notification to the end user via a mobile app. These solutions are not viable in that it requires the third party to have full management of the customer problem system. IBM offers a mobile development platform called Mobile First which offers the functions we desired, however it is not supported on the IBM i server platform which is the production ready hardware available for this project. The system design involved building a web service provider which then allows applications to make a call to it initiating a notification. Information is passed to the provider service and logged in a database. The web service provider queries the underlying table for each specified recipient to extract the device unique ID to build the notification request. This request is then passed through the Google Cloud messaging service to the respective devices. The mobile app receives the notification and upon opening it fetches detailed information from the server to display to the user. There may also be an optional URL that opens a secure VPN connection back to an IBM internal database for additional content viewing and workflow capabilities. Project Secure Page is currently deployed to a limited number of Android users in a pilot. Additional testing is required to validate the notifications are being sent correctly and in a timely manner. More iterations in the mobile app layout are expected as feedback is acquired from the users. Project Secure Page was a successful project. The primary objectives were completed with a working method to push a notification to an Android mobile device. This new service provides a platform for additional applications to take advantage of if the need to notify users exists.

Comments

dsu-th-258

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