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As part of a greenfield project, developing an online publication management framework, that includes Converting, Content management, Purchasing and Display modules.

 

 About the Project

 

Customer needs for the product:

  • Customized solutions
  • Modern and robust architectural foundation
  • Easy to use high-quality responsive design

Big picture:

 

Requirements against the electronic publications of publishing office:

  • Storage
  • Administration
  • Extension
  • Purchase
  • Encryption
  • Searching and sorting
  • View
  • Achieve training needs for the items above

From the customer's perspective: We can buy, share or receive online and downloadable books from the school that can be stored on our bookshelf where we can read them and take notes.

 

From the publisher's perspective: We can upload new publications to the system in a secure way. Moreover we have the possibility to view and maintain customer/publication/look and feel related processes.

 

The central element of the application is the book viewer where we can read and page the online publications.

 

Background

 

Project name: Online publication management framework development

 

Project type: Greenfield project

 

Period: From analyzing and planning processes to handover of the product

 

Used development methodology: SCRUM

 

What: To achieve a high-quality publication system based on market demand

 

Why: To enhance the promotion of online electronic education

 

Project period: 8 months

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Challenges/Custom Solutions:

 

1. Customer needs not fully defined

 

  • Challenge: The customer doesn't have a detailed overview of every subtask concerning usability and functionality.
  • Solution1: Usage of SCRUM. Introducing completed elements of the entire product in small iterations to the customer and proceed based on customer's feedback.
  • Solution2: More frequent communication with customer during the whole software development lifecycle.

 

2. To build to appropriate architecture that fulfills the requirements below:

 

3. To define the capability of the system:

  • Challenge: To validate the performance requirement completion considering user habits
  • Solution: Load test with scalable user habit simulation

 

4. Need for special design: 

  • Challenge: The need for user experience-based design, fitting customer image and complex logic
  • Solution:Implementing own design solutions based on customer's concept

 

5. Possibility of iterative customer test

  • Challenge: Insufficient predefined timeframe for testing after handover.
  • Solution: Establishing a test environment for customer use that is regularly updated with the latest version following each SCRUM demo

 

6. Downloading protection of PDF's

  • Challenge: To protect the uploaded online PDF contents
  • Solution: Encypting the PDF contents with a special encyption method. The PDF content is being uploaded as encrypted per page. It is being decoded when opened by the client

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Main Focus

 

Focus on quality of work (design, development, communication, technical debt)

Current status: Handover completed

 

Next steps: Monitoring customer feedback after going live.

 

Future: New developments based on ideas, market needs and business considerations

  • Extending functionality of the book viewer
  • Optimizing the book viewer to tablets/ipads
  • Personalized purchase
  • Improving user experience based on user feedback
  • Assigning filterable metadata to the books

Lessons learned:

  • Expand domain knowledge of the team with education (teachers' habits, structure of book viewers, purchasing business model of school books)
  • Gain even more experience in new technologies and user experience solutions