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IS480 Team wiki: 2012T1 Pro-cept ProjectOverview

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Home Project Members Project Overview Project Management Project Documentation Team Reflections

Arrow.jpg Project Description Arrow.jpg Motivation Arrow.jpg Deliverable Arrow.jpg Project Scope Arrow.jpg X-Factor Arrow.jpg Project Risk Arrow.jpg Technical Complexity Arrow.jpg Technologies


Star.jpgProject Description

Our team's project is inspired by the arduous process of the many projects that we have experienced in our school lives. Today, many technologies are made available to facilitate school projects for students. As such, many students leverage on these readily available resources in order to ensure the smooth sailing completion of their projects. Our team aims to improve this process by building an online project management and collaboration tool that caters specifically to the needs of students. We intend to integrate the functions of email, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Facebook Groups so that students can have a one-stop platform which will facilitate their school projects. This platform will help to reduce the time and hassle involved when saving and transferring information between different mediums. Also, it will aid students in receiving timely and accurate updates of the progress of the project as the updates will be consolidated on solely one main platform. Lastly, our project will also serve as a means to provide a medium for students to main a fair distribution and allocation of work to the members of the project.

Star.jpgMotivation

Currently, students use various communication and collaboration channels for their projects. Not only does this require time to navigate through the different channels, it is a source of problems such as miscommunication due to the scattered information and the lack of understanding of the progress of the project due to the absence of a unified platform to consolidate the updates. Moreover, using multiple channels and platforms also imply that there is no means to track the distribution of work. Hence, by combining the functions of multiple channels into a user-friendly single collaboration platform, we can facilitate the time management and improve productivity of project teams. Furthermore, by capturing the responses from the members with regards to the group updates, we aim to provide a measure of accountability within the team. Links need to be read and comments need to be rated for addition to minutes.

Want to know how we got our project inspiration? Check out the video HERE

Star.jpgDeliverable

An online project management and collaboration tool that will allows students to store and share files, create updates, set team agendas, milestones and deadlines, create and allocate tasks for other members, keep track of individual and team schedule, communicate with team members, and measure accountability all on one main platform.

Star.jpgProject Scope

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Star.jpgX-Factor

Our project aims to facilitate the progress of a student project by integrating multiple platforms that students use to increase efficiency. Although there are many of such project management tools available in the market (shown on the picture), our project clearly stands out due to the following factors:


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Analysis of Cons:

  • Majority of the existing project management tools are designed to suit large enterprises
  • Our project is catered specifically for student projects by providing functionalities that helps students to better manage their project,
    such as a timeline to record milestones, an agenda view to keep track of tasks, etc
  • While most of the existing project management tools available have a limit to the number of users/impose charges for an upgraded usage,
    our project is completely cost-free
  • Our project provides a measure of accountability in order to be fair to all members of a school project.


These factors sets us apart from the currently available project management tools and makes our project a one of a kind in the current market.

Star.jpgProject Risk

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Unspecified set of requirements to follow due to a lack of sponsor as this is a self-proposed project

  • The need to finalize the requirements at the very start of the project
  • The need to constantly update supervisor for feedbacks
  • The need to carry out Beta Testing to gather user feedbacks


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Unfamiliar with technologies such as Google Drive API as none of us have collectively implement the technologies proposed

  • The need to conduct prior research on the implementation of the technology used


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End user's unwillingness to switch to our platform for managing of their projects

  • The need to create a user-intuitive platform for ease of use to attract end users


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Unable to deliver User Testing due to short time frame (User Testing to be conducted at the beginning of the semester - Week 1)

  • The need to start the production process in the early stage

Star.jpgTechnical Complexity

Technical complexity are listed in the order of highest complexity:

S/No Description
1. Customization of Task List Calendar with 3rd Party (Full Calendar)

What is this feature about?

  • A calendar where users can keep track of their current tasks and events, members of a group can also schedule tasks for other members.


How is it complex?

  • The 3rd party application, Full Calendar provided libraries that did not really suit our needs.
  • Customization of the libraries:
    • Created pop-ups when users click on the task/event on the calendar
    • Implemented date and time picker when user creates a task
    • Created context menu – when user right clicks the task they have the option to delete the task
2. Uploading of Google Docs

What is this feature about?

  • Integration of Google Docs/Drive with our platform so that users can Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) Google Docs and files in their Google Drive folder directly from the platform.


How is it complex?

  • The latest version of Google API is Google Docs List API 3.0 – which is for Chrome apps. Since we’re not doing a Chrome app, we had to implement Google Docs List API 2.0. There were few instructions or help available on the implementation of this API.
3. Integration of Google Docs and Minute Taker

What is this feature about?

  • As we aim to provide a one-stop platform, our platform needs to provide a way for users to upload their minutes into the Google Drive (which can then be viewed on our platform). To do this, we need to integrate Google Docs/Drive with Minute Taker so that minutes that the users create will automatically by converted to a PDF document and will be saved in the user's Google Drive folder.


How is it complex?

  • Google introduced resumable protocol to replace uploading of files, this protocol consists of posting a request to Google in order to retrieve a unique upload URL. Using this URL, you will then need to implement a Put request to upload the file. As compared to the original API, which simply uses the "insert" method. Due to our lack of experience in dealing with HTTP requests and responses, we require more time to research and implement this integration.

Star.jpgTechnologies

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