Currency Server in Practice

TOPIC

Q: What can Currency Server do for me? Who uses Currency Server?

DISCUSSION

A: If you offer products or services online, Currency Server allows you to expand your audience by removing a subtle and often underestimated barrier between your offering and your potential customers.

For the IT department, Currency Server means less work and more peace of mind, having been designed for high performance, mission critical applications, and with the highest attention to ease of use and superior quality in detail.

The main functionality provided by Currency Server includes:

• Collection of up-to-date exchange rate information, with a wide selection of data sources to choose from (both free and subscription-based, e.g. national central banks, or private service providers)
• High performance COM/ActiveX, and .NET and SOAP Web service interfaces provide exchange rate information (e.g. "How much is one euro?") and conversion (e.g. "What is the cost of this book, toy or hotel room in Japanese yen?") services, which take into account local rounding rules and whether one or both currencies are part of regimes (e.g. European Economic and Monetary Union) which may require specific triangulation procedures
• Notification of administrators in case of problems, without affecting functionality (e.g. if the data source is unreachable the software keeps working with cached data, and notifies the administrator via pager, email, etc., if so desired)

Two of the most typical application scenarios of Currency Server are:

• Corporate back-office operations in larger organizations working with different currencies (e.g. for accounting, procurement, expense management, etc.)
• E-commerce systems designed to support pricing in different currencies (e.g. a site selling books, or flowers, etc., where the customer can choose to see prices in a given currency, and this preference may be stored in the account data, or using cookies)

Additional applications include:

• Web sites offering exchange rate information (e.g. a travel portal offering a quick conversion service with From/To drop-downs and an input field, or a table with cross-rates, or printable "cheat sheets", etc.)
• Servers feeding data to remote clients, for example currency calculators which need daily exchange rates (e.g. an application created with Calculator Builder)
• Components preinstalled by ISPs on their Windows-based hosting plans
• More complex and custom solutions, also including sophisticated options for redundancy and for the administration of multiple servers

Also see:

• 3-153 - Competitive Advantages of Currency Server
• 3-154 - Currency Server vs. in-House Development
• 3-181 - Currency Server Software vs. Web Services