Project Brief

Ordnance Survey Ireland was established in 1824. Their mainstream public service function is creating and maintaining the definitive mapping records of Ireland and also assumed the commercial function of the organisation.

Ordnance Survey Ireland’s vision is to have a very powerful e-commerce platform where their clients can easily get the data they’re looking for providing them with powerful tools to filter, customise and quickly access data. Monsoon Consulting partnered with Version1 and Ordnance Survey Ireland to re-platform their old e-commerce system to the Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition platform.

At the beginning of this project, we had multiple meetings with Ordnance Survey Ireland to understand their old e-commerce platform journey and the pitfalls of it.  We also worked with OSI to further understand their vision, their targeted audience, their products and the internal workflows of their multiple departments. From all of this, four main areas of focus arose.

Our Solution

Organising the catalogue

Ordnance Survey Ireland has massives amount of data in their systems and one of the key points of the project was to organise this data and create a product out of it. Multiple exercises and workshops were organised with the staff members to get as much information as possible for each product. After this, we looked at how Magento importer works and the structure of the CSV file it uses. We came to the decision to build a custom module that maps Ordnance Survey Ireland’s data to the right fields and helps the staff in the process of adding and updating the catalogue frequently by making it easy to read.

Customising the product

Most of the Consumer and Professional products have to be customisable so the user can select the format, scale, centre coordinates, area, etc. for the type of map they want. A set of tools were built around the map viewer on the product page using ESRI’s framework and services. One of the key challenges we faced was the integration of all of this with Magento as the ESRI’s framework uses the Dojo toolkit. Monsoon Consulting worked on the creation of the Map Viewer module and the integration of it with Magento’s backend.

Mobile view of the site

Product generation

After an order with a customised product is placed, it goes to Ordnance Survey Ireland’s servers to generate a map using the user’s inputted details. After the generation is complete, a link comes back to Magento and the order is updated so the client can download it. For this, we developed an integration between Magento (iBridge) and SOA (middleware).

Magento Cloud

Ordnance Survey Ireland was one of the first projects to be developed on the new Magento Cloud platform. This led us to change our way of developing, testing and deploying code to the multiple environments set up. This platform allows OSI to deal with all of the online sales with the performance shoppers expect.

Project Features

SOA Integration
API Based Integration

  • Stock
  • Invoices

Real-Time Integration

  • Order creation
  • Product generation

Other Functionality

  • Creation and integration of the Map Viewer element into Magento
  • Automatic Invoicing
  • Realex integration on the admin side
  • Downloadable products customisations for OSI needs
  • Catalogue importer customisations
  • Creation of a quotation PDF from the admin side
  • Custom sequential order increment ID generation mechanism to work with Magento Cloud architecture.

The Result

Monsoon Consulting delivered a fully responsive, eCommerce platform on Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition which is integrated with Ordnance Survey Ireland’s internal ERP and product generation services through SOA. We continue to provide technical support to them along with plans of further development with new Magento features in the future as their online presence scales.

Launch site