Describes the operational requirements for the Contractor Web product
This article is for IT and security professionals
Technical Overview
Contractor Web is a web application that runs on IIS using ASP.NET that works with the Pulse Core products. It is designed for contractors that need to work with Work Orders but do not require access to the full suite of Pulse products.
Devices
Contractor Web is a web application that uses HTML5 and is delivered through the browser. Desktop, laptop and tablet delivery modes are supported.
Architecture
- Contractor Web is designed as a corporate web application, designed for traditional on-premise deployments. FMI does not recommend nor support web access to this application across network boundaries. In particular, this application should not be open to the Internet.
- The contractor web application is a traditional three-tier application with the application tier running on IIS. This is hosted on-premise and is recommended to be on a separate server from the Pulse database.
- The database contractor web uses is the same database that is used by the Pulse thick-client application.
The client-server model that Pulse was built around was very popular before prevalence of web applications. This model assumes that the database, the servers, and all the clients are running on a private local network. These assumptions determined the design of client-server architectures especially with respect to performance and security. This model is not suitable for Internet delivery. FMI does not recommend nor license Pulse for Internet or cloud deployments. While Contractor Web may run outside of local networks without the performance problems of client-server, for security reasons, FMI does not recommend using Contractor Web unless on the same local network as Pulse.