Campus Net - IBM Remote Mentoring Project : Part II of II

My last post on this subject was basically an overview of what we did as part of this Remote Mentoring project and in this post I plan to provide a little more insights into what and how we developed, some lessons learnt during the course..
At the inception of the project, I had a detailed discussion with the girls and their guide - Prof. Mengale about the possible use cases / scenarios for the project and agreed to implement

1. A Survey
2. A poll
3. A Calender / Time Table (lectures, practicals, holidays.. etc.)
4. An Election
5. Campus Placements
6. A Quiz

The objective was to understand the concepts of role based access to collaborative content during the various states of the use case - ie. CRUD (Create, Read (and Aggregate), Update, Delete) operations in collaborative applications.

For eg. a poll hardly needed any security or role based access and needed instantaneous aggregation of data while in case of an Election the data privacy and restricted access was of extreme importance and aggregation was required only at the end with access to aggregated data in a very structured manner (to announce the election results to general public)

The Time Table widget was the first widget that surfaced when the project idea came into existence, while poll, survey were very common applications that were not necessarily related to a campus / academic institution's requirement. Campus Placement is a very practical use case and deserves to be built as a standalone application - as a matter of fact could be a SaaS application (Software as a Service) which can benefit Academic Institutions and Companies across India - after a bit of research I figured out that there are already a couple of such companies which offers this application as a service for example
http://ecampusplacement.com/index.html

The Quiz was very similar to Surveys except for the fact that a Quiz required evaluation of the response from individual and declaring a winner while Surveys required aggregation and representation of the result set / data in a particular format.

The students found Lotus Widget Factory to be very unfriendly as the learning curve to understand builders was very steep. Nevertheless, myself and Amit helped them overcome the obstacles with resolutions that we learnt while we mentored them. To some problems they faced we did not have straightforward resolutions and only had workarounds. This is what we do in reality too when it comes implementing projects in real life- when it comes to taking a system to go-live, beyond a certain point we have to get the stakeholders to agree to work arounds and get the system operational...