When faced with a Web project, one always wonders: Someone must have done that before, right?
Almost always the answer is a resounding “Yes!”, and that puts you on the path towards purchasing, customizing and launching the solution to meet the project’s requirements.
Recently, I took on a project involving a “mash-up” of a Social Networking, eLearning and eCommerce site. How do you even start on a project like that? What are the implications and costs? These are only a few of the questions that come to mind with a project of this size.
Aligning Requirements with Solutions
After extensive online research, and referencing past experiences with projects of a similar nature, I finalized the foundation of the site down to 3 products: AspDotNetStorefront ML (eCommerce), Community Server 2007 (Social Networking) and Adobe Connect Professional (eLearning).
The biggest task is to start aligning the client’s expectations and requirements with what each of the products above offer “out of the box”, and to also produce customization points that will be required in the final site.
This process generally involves hands-on meetings, product demos, documenting and the like, all towards an effort to produce documentation outlining the User Experience supported with Use Cases and Business Requirements.
Design Phase
Approaching the design is probably one of the most challenging parts of any IT project, as it requires you to essentially build the solution on paper. However, in this situation we have to approach things a little differently.
Since we are not building everything from scratch, we have to create documentation that supports several key areas of the project:
- Integration Requirements – how each solution will integrate together and deliver functionality, such as “single sign on” and data sharing
- Customization Requirements – what parts of each solution need to be customized accross all 3 layers (UI, business logic, database)
- Physical Requirements – what type of hardware and networking equipment are needed to meet the demands of the site and each solution
These documents create a foundation for us to start the project and move towards the development phase with near 100% certainty as to what the final site should look like and function. Furthermore, these documents should dictate the tasks required by a developer to be heads down in the project without much concern on how everything should be done.
Next month I will post an update on this project, with details on how the design phase progressed.
