Company
A nationwide smart card system provider who creates custom smart card solutions for college campuses. This includes smart card kiosk stations where students can perform electronic transactions with secure card chips, revalue stations where students can add money to the electronic purse and vending devices that allow vending machines to validate and transact with the students card.

Project
To design and implement the next generation kiosk system including administration tools on an NT platform using internet technologies. The first stage of the project involved porting the existing Unix card libraries to NT and demonstrating the feasibility of using internet technologies and components to implement a customizable kiosk interface. The second stage involved creating the kiosk applications that interfaced with the card allowing for card revalue (addition/removal of money from the secure purse) electronically, display of the last ten purse transactions, and display of general kiosk information. The third stage involved creating the tools necessary to administer the card holder population. This included card holder information access/updates, card activation/deactivation, importing vending device transactions and vendor and bank account management.

Solution
C-Sharp worked in conjunction with the existing developers to design the overall system and document all of the sub-system interactions. In parallel with the system design, we ported the existing Unix card libraries to NT and demonstrated the first kiosk interactions with a smart card within just a couple weeks! We embedded Microsoft Internet Explorer into an MFC framework application to act as the kiosk front end. All of the interactions between the kiosk and the card were performed using ActiveX controls run inside of the IE application. For backend processing and dynamic information updates, we used Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) running on an IIS3.0 NT web server. To ensure security, all server side objects interacted with the database through a middleware layer using remote procedure calls. As a final step in completing the smart card system, we developed an administration prototype that was accessible through the web and maintained browser independence. The administration prototype allowed card holder information retrieval and updates, card activation and deactivation, inventory and security control, and vendor report generation using Crystal Reports.

Technologies Used
We used the following technologies to solve this problem:

• Microsoft Window NT
• Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0
• Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)
• ActiveX
• Microsoft InternetDev
• Microsoft IIS3.0
• Active Server Pages (ASP)
• Microsoft SQL Server
• ADO
• Crystal Reports
• Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)