crazybobbles

Previously, I have emailed Jonathan Briggs back about my ideas and whether or not he wants me to be my supervisor, havent got back to him yet, however, I have got replies from Andrew Leneghan, we would like to meet up for a quick discussion about the whole project he wishes me to do.

We’ve also got information about who are project advisors are, my advisor is Beryl Jones, she’s a Principal Lecturer & Field Leader for Information Systems. I’ve had her for my database modules and got an A out of it. Hopefully she can help me out a great deal.

I’ve organised to meet Andrew today and just emailed Beryl right now about my current situation in terms of project ideas, read on for the complete email (quite long winded)

Hiya,

I’m a final year student studying Computer Information Systems, you were allocated as my project advisor, I was wondering whether you have any time for us to discuss about my project ideas as I’m quite stuck in which path I should choose. I’ll give you a quick description about myself before I get into the gritty details

I’m a final year student at Kingston University. My main skills are xhtml, css, php, mysql, a bit of javascript and some xml (I did a few xml documents and created a rss feed for one of my sites). For my placement year, I worked at IBM at a customer site where I learnt quite a lot of vba coding (though probably not confident enough to produce a final project with it), I also looked into HCI and making sure that documents and pages were all very intuitive and easy to follow. I started designing websites around 2 years ago when I started my multimedia module, even though the teach taught us very little, I got right into it and produced my first website (www.crazybobbles.org) Soon after that I managed to get hold of some webhosting and that’s where it all began. I’ve produced a wiki (www.musewiki.org) which is a very popular band fansite/wiki these days (quite a lot of hits and growing). I’m a very fast/keen learner and am very familiar with the latest web technologies going on these days. I’ve recently got a webhosting resellers package where I will hopefully produce sites for clients and help run them at the same time. My main goal for this year is to make use of all of my web skills to produce some sort of website for a client and hopefully achieve an A for the project and a first for my degree (already got the grades I needed from second year)

Below are some ideas I would like to do for my final project.

Idea 1

For my placement year at IBM. There was one system which I felt the need of major improvements, this was the way the employees booked their time they’ve spent at work. Usually at IBM they would use a java based application called eClaim which is connected through to their internal servers. However, at my site where I worked at they had to fill in an additional timesheet which was used to bill their customers of what work was done. This could not have been done with eClaim as the customers wanted IBM to show exactly how many hours were booked for each project they requested from them. This meant a customer timesheeting system was built to generate finance reports for the customers to inspect and pay up. This system however is built on Microsoft Access 97 and used Excel spreadsheets as timesheet records for each person.

There are many flaws however with this process. The main one is the people in charge of collating the timesheets (the programme office team which I was a member of for the year). We would receive about 200 odd emails from all the people working at the customer site and would have to process all of it into a text based file (via excel macros) in order to import onto the database for report generation. Other flaws included no decent log of who sent a timesheet so people could easily say that they’ve sent one and we couldn’t back that up or challenge them and people generally not remembering how to timesheet.

My proposal for this situation is to make the whole timesheeting system web fronted. People would log into an online system which will allow them to book their time and be able to send their timesheets with confidence that they have been received by the programme office team. The information can easily be exported out into XML and imported back in if they would like to reuse their timesheet from a different time. I’m hoping to do a bit of AJAX on the front end as well as I would like to be able to allow users to fill in a timesheet with a minimal amount of refreshing. The output of this online system would be either an xml file of the timesheets collated or maybe a text file so it can be read on the database. The system would also make use of its mail sending functions which it can send reminders for those who still haven’t sent in their timesheets or those who have missed the deadline.

Idea 2

My final idea (which seems like the most practical one). Was suggested by a lecturer at Kingston University, I was approached by a lecturer (Andrew Lenaghan) who suggested a project for me to do. It was to port a Network and Communications (ncg.kingston.ac.uk) site into a CMS type site. He is very open to what features could be added onto the site and was willing to match his requirements to something I was able and happy to produce.

Here is a quote of what he wanted me to do

“You have the gist of what we are looking to achieve - that of porting the existing content from the NCG site into a CMS but we would look to beyond just porting into exploring what potential some of the new web type technologies/services might offer - calendars, document repositories, message board, blogs, etc. We do have some particular “workflow” type issues for preparing documents for publication and coordinating research (ie project management)

The project could be framed in a couple of different ways - I would want to get enough ’substance’ into it to make it technically challenging for the developer as well as useful to the group.

We half have a CMS in mind (dotnetnuke) but we could potentially consider other CMS’s (I like jamoola myself) - ie it could be a project about assessing and selecting CMS’s, or we could make that decision fairly quickly and focus on the services a CMS could deliver, or even the networking (load balancing / robustness).

So is there a bottom line in terms of delivering a working site but we are pretty open get into some negotiations about taking the work in a direction that would interest you as well. (A good project should let you show some initiative and not just routinely meet a set of requirement).”

As its quite flexible I would like to explore on the idea of producing the whole CMS system from and perhaps customising it with my own extensions. I initially wanted to produce a content management system myself to prove that there are some vital differences between producing a system that was built specifically for a purpose and using generic CMS software..

Idea 3

My second idea would be to revamp one of my sites that I worked on for my multimedia module. The site was a fan site for the band “Muse” and included a gallery, message board, and place for people to view my covers of the band. However, the site feels like it could be improved, not only by the design, but by features such as allowing users to upload their covers, creating a more integrated gallery for users to upload their photos and so on. The problem with this idea is that the project lacks a client. There isn’t a person responsible in the community which makes it hard for me to produce a site out of a client’s requirements and specifications. The idea was considered mainly because it would be one of those projects that I would be highly motivated in producing (as it was my site).

I’ve had another think about the fan site for Muse idea. Though I am in contact with the band (and their management). Sadly they are quite hard to get in contact most of the times and are probably unlikely to attend any meetings or provide a criteria for me. However, I was thinking about revamping another Muse fansite which was made by my friend. His site is slightly different from the rest as it’s a podcasting site (www.musecast.co.uk) Pod casts are created every two weeks and its generally well received. I was thinking perhaps it would be good to use this site instead to do a fansite on. The difference of using this site is that I actually have a client to work with this time (the pod cast broadcaster). I was hoping I could do stuff like making sure it looks more Web 2.0, perhaps a AJAX chatroom, google optimization and create a backend for his site so he can update the site more easily (he still updates the html manually bless him).

Hope these ideas are ok, looking forward to hearing from you about them

Regards

There you go, hopefully I’ll get a reply soon