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...

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

IBM University Relations runs a program called "Remote Mentoring" (Now called "Global Remote Mentoring") where an IBMer mentors a bunch of college students to complete their academic project. The name remote comes from the fact that the students do not come and work at IBM premises. They use their own personal / college computing resources to work on the project. The project is jointly mentored by a faculty at the college and one or more IBMer. Interestingly, the program runs round the year and the duration depends on number of students, scope of work, academic requirement and several other factors. The project statements most often come from the IBMer who acts as the mentor and intent is to produce something useful for IBM resulting in an asset, white-paper, developerWorks article, patent etc. etc. The IBM software that is required as part of the project is made available through the Academic Initiative website that allows the student / college to download the software from the IBM website.

I proposed a project last year along with my college Amit Kumar (more popular as Amit Kumar33, as his IBM ID is Amit Kumar33/India/IBM.......... :--) ) where we wanted to build a solution on top of Lotus Connections (now IBM Connections) which will accelerate the adoption of Social Software in an Academic Institution. As part of this effort the 5 students from Cummins College of Engineering, Pune developed widgets that had following use cases / functionality implemented

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 students used the Lotus Widget Factory to develop the iWidgets and a VMImage with Lotus Connections installed to test their code. In the next post of the series of this article, I will elaborate a couple of use cases and also share some of the lessons we learnt during the course of this project.