3rd Year!

3rd Year, 1st post!

After knowing for most of the summer that I'd have to choose a project, and knowing too that "big" things were on the cards such as our next-generation-intranet, big wired and wireless network deployment and, (amongst other things,) sorting out our media services, something still niggles me that none of these are suitable.

Wednesday of last week, the situation was the same: It is quite hard to find a contained project which is SMART, suitable, beneficial and not just jumping through hoops.

Thursday of last week, our Librarian, Alison, was in the IT Dept office discussing scanning resolution, colour depth and compression settings to best store photos from the School archives. We've recently bought an archiving database, and it has fallen to Alison to process all of the School archive content into this database. Combine this with a brief discussion of how the Old Leysians (OLs) will access the content, probably online with help from "Sea Dragons" and the Genesis of a project was born: Deliver a means of presenting the Archives online to those with slow internet connections in a secure environment.

I spoke with my boss, Damian, about this, firmed up some ideas of School-job-time versus jolly-project-time, and took the idea back to Alison. She and I talked for about 1/2 hour, and we agreed on some loose deadlines. Hopefully, all of this will fall out into well presented material for my assignment...

Only one niggle seems to remain: We own the database data, we need to query it directly to push links to photos already, and we currently only have a Java based administration front end. Should we purchase the .asp (not .aspx, or .php) add on, or should we write it in house?

This project, therefore, covers:

• Learning new technology (Silverlight, Deepzoom, dz automation to process the images)
• Reading from the DB, and probably adding custom views to the DB to reduce application level logic
• Determining an authentication mechanism (which is part of the bigger picture of getting the OLs' contact details online)
• Handling the data-storage requirements, file systems and file naming conventions
• Delivering it in conjunction with phase two of our new website, with "external" deadlines - Alison has an agenda for getting content into the DB, John (the OL Secretary/contact) needs to be involved, other work projects and day-to-day tasks need to be considered.

This will need to be discussed further, but I suspect it meets all of the SMART ideals and will be suitable!