Shoosmiths Choose Microsoft BizTalk as an Integration Engine

About Shoosmiths

With a £93m turnover and working with clients such as HP, Krispy Kreme, a growing number of the FTSE 250 and some of the world’s most exciting and ambitious growth businesses, Shoosmiths is one of the UK’s fastest-growing national law firms.

The challenge

HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) is the executive agency responsible for the administration of the criminal, civil and family courts and tribunals in England and Wales and non-devolved tribunals in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and so confidential and sensitive information is electronically shared by and to them from law firms. HMCTS had implemented a new Secure Data Transfer (SDT) gateway to streamline the submission of money claims. As a result Shoosmiths were required to put in place integration between their two existing case management systems – Visualfiles & IDR – and the HMCTS SDT system.

The solution would need to accommodate both Shoosmiths’ operational processes together with the HMCTS implementation. To achieve this, changes were required within Shoosmiths’ internal systems, in parallel to Transparity’s creating the SDT solution interface.

The solution

Shoosmiths chose to implement Microsoft BizTalk as an integration engine (which will later also be extended to support the firm’s Enterprise Service Bus). Due to the timescales outlined by HMCTS and ongoing commitments to other high profile projects, Shoosmiths needed assistance from a Microsoft Partner organisation that could rapidly get to grips with the firm’s requirements and could deliver a scalable solution in a very short timescale. They therefore enlisted the help of Transparity.

The solution was based on BizTalk Server 2013 and the BizTalk ESB Toolkit. The ESB resides between the Line of Business (LOB) systems and the SDT system, and has the capability to act in real time or in batches with respect to both incoming and outgoing messages.

The HMCTS SDT is a real time Web Service based system. Shoosmiths have two internal LOB claims systems, one used by 80% of the users and one by 20%. Neither of these systems have built-in sophisticated integration capabilities therefore the methods of interchange are:

• Incoming and outgoing communication handled by files being placed into a drop folder.
• Incoming and outgoing calls made through staging tables in a SQL database.

Support: The support hours began on go-live of the system with hours purchased on account and called off as they are used. The support is flexible and uncomplicated, being used for fixes, as well as updates, routine maintenance and system health checks.

The outcome

Andrew Souter, Business Systems Manager at Shoosmiths said of the project, “The integration with HMCTS is critical to our business. In the short timescales available, the easy option would have been to develop a specific point solution, adding yet more complexity to our systems landscape. Instead, the use of BizTalk provides us with flexibility to enhance the solution as the integration with HMCTS evolves, whilst being able to extend the use of this service to other parts of the business if required.”