The National Commercial Bank is the most prominent of Saudi banks and was the first bank established in Saudi Arabia. With the initial paid-up capital SR 30 million (US$ 8 million) , NCB today is one of the largest bank in the middleeast.

NCBCAPITALIPW, the investment wing of NCB , offers its clients a comprehensive range of diverse investment products. The products can be tailored to the clients' individual risk/return requirements and can vary between being fully Shariah approved by NCB to partially approval by another Shariah council or non-Shariah approved.

4SPOTS was engaged to develop an intranet solution to manage the huge range of products and provide information to investors and business development managers of NCB Capital.

The client required a system that allowed its staff to effectively manage the various products the Bank offered. 4SPOTS had to focus on the following:

1. User interface that allows for easy access and quick updates

2. Extensibility for future additions

NCB Capital has numerous products with many attributes such as Asset class,shariah compliant capital protection etcare rarely constant and change everyday.

The challenge was to develop a CMS which will allow administrator to define these attributes and assign multiple nested sub attributes under it.

Our team created the solution which not only allows the administrator to define these attributes but also associate products with numerous variations of such attributes.

For the user it is always difficult to refine the search of products with more than 1500 possibilities. To keep it simple , we decided to develop the application with AJAX (Asynchronous Java And XML). Ajax was a raw programming language at the time and was used in very few sites like gmail.

The biggest advantage of using Ajax for this application was the user was not required to wait till the screen refreshes for the filter search of products. This made the application working like an application over the web rather than usual websites.

This application also had useful tools like SMS , elearning etc. which was developed for the business development managers to communicate easily through this intranet.

At the time the project was developed , Ajax was not popular amongst programmers, our team had to write an Ajax framework for this project which later was used by many programmers worldwide and appreciated. Though much more sophisticated frameworks have been developed over the years , this light-weight version is still being used in many projects.