The Client :
Our customer is a US-based company that offers solutions for visual collaboration and communication tools. These solutions enhance the way people learn, work, and communicate visually through a broad portfolio of products.

The Challenge :
The Client developed two soft wares that enabled desktop interface with four different types of Whiteboards. By projecting the Desktop contents on the Whiteboard, the user could now control the PC remotely by using a stylus or an Infra red remote, thus offering a wider view of his PC to a larger audience.

However, a large number of defects and an architectural flaw rendered the software unreadable and averse to enhancing features and fixing defects. The project being at a nascent stage, ennovate proposed a refracted architecture for the software and also offered to enhance features, test usability and fix defects in line with the new architecture. After being assured of the robustness and versatility of the new architecture suggested by ennovate, the client outsourced complete Product Life cycle Management (PLM) to our offshore development center.

The Solution :

• Design and Development
  ennovate refracted the existing code architecture on Windows Platform in order to improve readability and versatility of the code and accommodate all future feature enhancements and bug fixes.
  Here are some of the major features developed
  


• The software allowed two modes of data manipulations : Cursor and Mark-up. However, while user swapped between both modes, all the mark-up actions were replayed until the last action performed. Though the screen did record the final status of mark-up, there was a delay introduced through the replay of actions.
  ennovate modified the code and enabled an option to choose between a replay of all mark-up actions (as was existent) and instant final status display.


• While desktop was projected on the white board, a portion of the whiteboard excluding the projected portion was wasted. Any actions using stylus/marker on this portion was subsequently neither recorded nor visible to attendees.
  In order to extend the boundaries of the desktop projection and add flexibility to whiteboard's recorded actions, ennovate developed a feature through which a pop-up window would fade in, in the desktop projection area and simulate stylus/marker activity accordingly. The moment stylus/marker was disabled or removed from white board; the pop up window would fade out. This made up for complete white board utility and porous desktop projection boundaries



• Since two softwares could be used on user system to run the whiteboard application and 4 boards could be simultaneously connected to any machine, at times switching between both the soft wares was required. Previously   had to manually switch between software after checking board status. ennovate automated the switching process by developing a function through which the unused software checks for itself if any boards were available and prompts the user prior to hooking onto an available board.



• ennovate also implemented aesthetic features like highlighting and shading of projected text, improving readability and text dynamics for better understanding.



• Bluetooth technology is enabled for integrated Bluetooth of MacBook.



• Orientation of the cursor is according to left hand writer if enabled.



• Apart from English language, Chinese, Russian, German, Hungarian, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic are also supported.



• Software has been modified to support full UNICODE. Hence it became possible for a user to run software in a non-unicode language and save snapshots in a folder named in a Unicode language and vice versa. Also this granted full language independence to display menus and dialogs in a language in which it is installed independent from the Operating system's Code page conversion tables for that language. Viz. a user don’t need to change the code page conversion table from Operating System's regional & language settings and restart the machine for W&T to display menus and dialogs in that language. 


• Incase if a lightning Whiteboard's memory loses its sensor location information, Walk-and-Talk software automatically detects this and restores the correct sensor information in the Whiteboard's memory
  
  
• Software provides Calibration-Free interactive Whiteboard. Through Lightning Technology which eliminates the need to perform the four, eight, or sixteen point calibration of standard interactive whiteboards.



• In the original application, software did not support TS and TSL types of whiteboards. We ported TS and TSL whiteboards with Walk-and-Talk.

• Testing
  ennovate ensured that the product had zero critical defects and was functioning as desired for every release made to the client. Test Plans, Test Cases and execution was performed and defects were maintained in bug tracking tool for every QA cycle. QA Testing was performed on the complete Windows suite as well as Mac OS.
  
  Following Test processes were performed in the course of QA Testing:
  -Smoke/sanity testing
  -Ad-hoc testing
  -Funtional tests
  -Regression tests
  -Localization testing (Spanish, Hungarian languages)
  -Stress Testing for Desktop application
  -Installer tests

• Porting
  The application was designed to be compatible with all Windows OS versions. However, due to a drastic change in the security model of Windows Vista, it failed to run on it. ennovate figured out an optimal path to port application on Vista.
   
• Sustenance
  ennovate performed product sustenance for around 3 months during which over 40 defects were detected and fixed, and some minor features were also developed.
  
  
• Release Management
  ennovate performed versioning of software with the help of our client. Windows Install Shiled premier 2008 and MAC Iceberg software were utilized in the process. Apart from that, ennovate has done 2 releases. Now working for 3rd release on 30th  June, 2008.

The Technology :
Visual C++, MFC, XCode, Objective-C, Cocoa