Workshop booking

Booking a workshop appointment is one of those operations that look simple until you look inside. You need to know which workshops exist, which services each one offers, which slots are free this week, whether the customer's vehicle is registered and under which plate, and finally write the appointment into the system the service advisors use.

None of that lives in the portal: it lives in SAP and in the CRM. The portal only provides the face. That's why this project isn't a page but an application: an Angular front end, deployed as a Client Extension inside Liferay, that consumes the corporate APIs to read real availability and register the booking.

The advantage of solving it as a Client Extension rather than a classic portlet is twofold. The application is developed and deployed on its own cycle, with Angular's tooling, without recompiling OSGi modules or restarting the portal on every change. And at the same time it runs inside the portal session, so it inherits the site's authentication and navigation: to the customer it's just another Kaufmann page.

It's the project where integration weighs more than design. The value is in the slot the customer sees as free on screen being the slot that's really free in the workshop.