CADD Associates Case Study
Project: Moderated Video Web Site
Technologies: Flash, Flash Media Server, AJAX, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, SQL Server, WSE 2.0, C#, VB.NET, HTML, Javascript
While this project didn't directly involve mechanical engineering it benefited from our rigourous approach to software and professional development.
When this long time client came to us with an idea for a new video sharing site that was safe for kids we got pretty excited about the potential. They had a rudimentary static web site they had created with the help of an intern and they had already made some committments that invested them in Adobe's Flash and Flash Media. While Flash wasn't in our toolkit at the time we jumped on the project, learned Flash in three weeks and produced a working product that they could show at a convention in under a month. That product was called the
VideoPlex. We were speaking to Abobe's International K-12 Development manager and when he first saw it he said "How did you do this?" and he told us to submit it for an
Adobe award for demonstrating Flash capabilities which it
later won.
It's a small, fast, rich Flash application that contains all the components required for a moderated video sharing web site.
Obviously the project required careful architecture of a moderation scheme for students in High School or younger. That's a sensitive project to execute but we came up with an elegant and unique moderation scheme that lets teachers and parents moderate their own students' videos. It included workflows, notifications, fail safes and careful authentication procedures so that schools and parents could trust SchoolTube.com to protect their kids.
Then SchoolTube wanted to let some select students actually edit the web site's content to keep the different sections fresh. CADD Associates looked at using Microsoft SharePoint, Clickability, Community and a number of other Content Management Systems (CMS). They cost in the range of $20,000 to $40,000 and my client said that it wasn't important enough yet to justify that cost. So CADD Associates dug a little deeper and found a CMS that cost less than a tenth of the other CMSes we had looked at. It has online Authoring with a WYSIWYG HTML editor, Publisher & Editor Control, Version Rollback, Blogs, Calendars, RSS Feeds, Scrolling News Blocks, Photo Galleries, and the list goes on.
SchoolTube liked it so we deployed it for them and wrote a couple of custom modules for it giving them control over the video presented on each page. SchoolTube, their interns and some select students gained control of the web site's content. That was really exciting to see.
That complex web site with video sharing, moderation and CMS capabilities has run stably for over six months practically unattended.
The most rewarding part of the project was when schools that had blocked YouTube and Yahoo Video on their servers because of uncontrollable content would open their firewalls for SchoolTube. The careful and rigorous design of the moderation methodology was paying off and SchoolTube has had more and more interest ever since.
We were direct about not having Flash in our toolkit and we were just as direct about our confidence that we could master it quickly and we did. Software development is as much about knowledge as it is about the effective application of new skills and that's what CADD Associates thrives on.
How can we help you?
Jeff Roberts
CADD Associates
13065 Little Big Horn Ct.
Ste. Genevieve, MO
63670
(636) 537-8120
http://www.caddassociates.com