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The Customer
Customer is a leading media distribution company that
provides fully secured content delivery over broadband
platform to a global audience. The existing web portal
contains the movie trailers, news, videos and bulletin
downloads. Customer expressed an interest in extending
the portal to build a social network centered around
films, videos and songs, stars and music. Customer approached
Hanu Software for the design and development of the
Social Networking website.
Objectives
To design and develop a Social Networking website in
a quickest possible time period; The whole impetus for
the portal should revolve around providing utmost flexible
and innovative application, where a user can freely
interact with other users using various avatars and
different custom defined environment to reflect user’s
mood and emotions. Portal was to equip with ultra privacy
settings to prevent unauthorized users gain access.
Following are the Key features / modules of the application
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- Profile management
- Star profiles
- Fan clubs
- User interest groups
- Walls and Messages
- Photos and albums
- People networking with their family,
friends etc.
- Collaborations
- Basic and advanced searches
- Multi tiered Privacy configurations.
- Administration Module to
manage all the above features
The website had to be at par
with existing popular communities such as myspace and
facebook to match user-friendliness and make it feature
rich. The website should also provide features including
multi factor profile search, online dating between people
who share the same hobbies and interests as well as
possible business connections, creating own special
interest group and many more advance utilities. The
current trend of photo sharing on the internet made
it necessary to allot enough space to the users so that
they can add their picture and the pictures of there
friends as well to their profile. Hanu took these tasks
as a challenge and delivered the project with 100% customer
satisfaction.
Challenges
- To design a database for a large
network community to achieve an excellent page to
page response time.
- User centric web site designing,
with template based approach to easily change look
and feel and color scheme of the website.
- Architecture and design required
many advanced technologies like AJAX, thumbnailing
and URL rewriting etc for achieving the good user
interface and performance.
- Hanu Software leveraged its unique
5 phase offshore delivery model for this project.
To learn more about the offshore delivery model -http://www.hanusoftware.com/html/offshore/index.html
- During the ‘Requirements
Development’ phase, HTML mock ups were developed
and reviewed jointly with the customer to finalize
the look and feel as well as the navigation of the
application.
- Hanu Software’s Quality
Management System was followed throughout the life
cycle of the project.
- AJAX was also used in the development
process. AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript
and XML, is a web development technique for creating
interactive web applications. The intent is to make
web pages feel more responsive by exchanging smallamounts
of data with the server behind the scene, so that
the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each
time the user makes a change. This is meant to enhance
the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.
- Customer interaction – Weekly
teleconferences were held (using the VoIP telephone
service installed at the HSS offshore center) to keep
the customer up to date on the progress, and also
to discuss open issues. Query resolution through Emails,
chat and voice chat as needed.
- During the Development phase,
regular online Demo of the application was scheduled
to get the early feedback from the customer on the
completed work.
- After the development was over,
the QA group started the System Testing phase by executing
the system test cases and reporting the defects back
to the development team.
- After the QA verification, system
was delivered to the Customer. HSS offshore team helped
the Customer with the installation of the system.
During the Customer Acceptance phase, minimal defects
were reported.
- The system was successfully
deployed within the four months over the deployment
servers managed by the third party hosting services
on Customer’s behalf.
Our Solution
- Hanu Software leveraged
its unique five phase offshore delivery model for
this project. To learn more about the offshore delivery
model -
http://www.hanusoftware.com/html/offshore/index.html
- During the ‘Requirements
Development’ phase, HTML mock ups were developed
and reviewed jointly with the customer to finalize
the look and feel as well as the navigation of the
application.
- Hanu Software’s quality
management system was followed throughout the development
life cycle of the project.
- Latest Third party control and
services like Cute Editor, Active reports, Calendar,
Date-Time picker, Chart FX lite, Domain creation API
and shipping carriers were used to reduce the development
time and make the application feature-rich.
- Template Support - Each template
consists of various controls and a aspx form. The
aspx form is used for displaying the content. As soon
as the template is changed, new set of controls are
loaded according to the selected template. The controls
are defined inside a configuration file. Example of
the controls are left navigation bar, header, footer
etc.
- Customer interaction – Weekly
teleconferences were held (using the VoIP telephone
service installed at the HSS offshore center) to keep
the customer up to date on the progress, and also
to discuss open issues. Query resolution through Emails,
chat and voice chat as needed.
- During the Development phase,
regular online Demo of the application was scheduled
to get the early feedback from the customer on the
completed work.
- After the development was over,
the QA group started the System Testing phase by executing
the system test cases and reporting the defects back
to the development team.
- After the completion of
System Testing, HSS offshore team helped the customer
with the installation of the system. During the Acceptance
testing phase, less than 10 defects were reported.
Benefits to
the clients
- Cost Effective Product Development.
- Faster Time to market –
HSS took the project from the requirements gathering
to the production rollout in little under four months.
Architecture
Diagram
Page Template Layout
| Header
user control |
| Menu User Control |
Welcome user control |
Ad
Display |
Server
Controls
|
| |
Footer user control |
|
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