Porting Virtual Collaboration Tool client to WINDOWS VISTA & MAC

Executive Summary

Our customer is a market leader in visual collaboration and communication tools. Their solutions enhance the way people learn, work and communicate visually through a broad portfolio of products.

ennovate Technologies was involved in developing a prototype called "Thunder" first for a technology show and then a complete product including sustenance/maintenance support.

Thunder enables individuals and teams to share data in any format brainstorm and ideate together regardless of location, facilities or time zone. Thunder provides organizations with a Global Collaboration Network, seamlessly uniting people, process and technology. Utilizing a multi-screen projected display system, data from any source (computer files, scanned images, video images or handwritten notes and sketches) lights up the room on virtual “flipchart” pages. The information is displayed on the wall of the room and can be edited in real time either in the THUNDER room itself or by remote participants connected from any computer. The data from the THUNDER session is captured and stored for ongoing development or distributed automatically by email.

ennovate team has delivered a working prototype in 2 months, converted prototype into a product and has been providing with sustenance and maintenance support for the past 4 years, helping customer to achieve cost benefits with quality deliverable.

ennovate ported Thunder customer on Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / NT / 2003 / XP / Vista and Mac OS. For Vista, printer handling feature was developed in C++, since Flash is largely platform independent.  For Mac, the entire Windows C++ code was ported using Objective-C and COCOA APIs. 

The Customer

• Our customer is a market leader in visual collaboration and communication tools. Their solutions enhance the way people learn, work, and communicate visually through a broad portfolio of products. ennovate Technologies was involved in developing "Thunder" a tool for enterprise collaboration and distance learning.

The Challenge

• Our customer wanted to launch a prototype of this product in a trade show (InfoComm 2005) that was just two months away from the start of project. ennovate was provided with a concept specification and the challenge was to develop a working prototype in this short time span
• The key differentiator in this collaborative tool was, unlike other conferencing systems, the information data is retrieved and available to all attendees using virtual flipchart tool, scanner, real time video and one click publish feature. Our customer also entrusted to us, the complete Product Lifecycle Management of this product that included design, development of architecture and QA for the complete system

The Solutions

• Prototype Development: ennovate was involved with the development of a prototype for Thunder application that demonstrates the basic functionality of the system like multiple page support, drawing / moving / deleting strokes on pages, projected pages, collaboration of multiple Thunder Easel application. Our R&D team suggested an innovative idea of using Flash MX, Flash Action Script for GUI development, Flash Communication Server for communication between Thunder Easels and customers applications and C++ for handling back-end tasks like printing, scanning etc. Flash provided rich user interface whereas C++ provided functionalities which are absent in Flash
• Design & Development: After the Prototype was developed and approved by our customer, ennovate worked on the first production release of Thunder. Responsibilities included designing & architecting the software, development and testing. Thunder software can be interfaced with multiple peripherals like Scanner, Printer, DVD Player, Web Camera etc Thunder replaces traditional paper flipcharts with dynamic digital images and finally gives collaborative teams all of the tools they need to work and learn together or remotely. Following are the key features of the product developed by the Team ennovate:
  • One touch feature to flip through different virtual charts, edit, save, print and email notes
  • Real-time participation of Local and remote teams
  • Projection of participants' laptop content on the walls of a meeting room
  • Discarding the need to take meeting notes or copy flipchart content with auto-save feature
  • Immediate distribution of meeting content to all participants via email
  • Saving and restoring work in its original form
  • Instant scanning, real-time video, and One-Click Publishing™ for simple, immediate distribution of materials
• Testing: QA team of ennovate, ensured that the project is of high quality and with zero critical defects when delivered to the customer. Test team was also involved in creating test plans, test cases for each and every feature of Thunder, execution of test cases and maintaining defects in bug tracking tool
• Porting to multiple OS: Although Thunder Easel is supposed to work on Windows XP only, Thunder Customer has to work flawlessly on Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / NT / 2003 / XP / Vista and Mac OS. As Flash is platform independent, there were very minor OS specific changes made in Flash Action Script code. Only printer handling in C++ code was developed to specific Windows Operating systems. For Mac, the entire Windows C++ code was ported using Objective-C and COCOA APIs
• Sustenance: After first production release, ennovate technologies was assigned the task of sustaining and maintaining Thunder software. Since February 2006 we are maintaining Thunder. Our role here is to add features and fix defects in Thunder. Since Thunder development was started at ennovate technologies, three versions of Thunder has been released to end-users. We are currently working on fourth release of Thunder software
• Release Management: ennovate technologies manage release management for Thunder software as well. Our responsibilities include preparing setup for releases and managing all major and patch releases to be done to Polyvision’s customers. We extensively use CVS and its functionalities like tagging and branching to make sure that we can go back to any release at any point of time

The Technology

• Flash MX, Flash Action Script, Flash Communication Server, VC++, MFC, Win32 Programming, Windows 98/ME/NT/ 2000/2003/XP/ Vista and Mac OS X

The Benefits

• The prototype was developed in a short deadline of two months and was launched in time for InfoComm 2005. Subsequently it bagged “Best innovative product of the year” award at the tradeshow
• Improved quality of the software and drivers that helped in substantial cost saving
• Flash based technology gave the product excellent aesthetics for User Interface / Animations and good product performance
• Reliable and quality solution with timely releases
• Rapid scaling of the development team on short notice
• Huge savings on Time and Money for the customer due to offshore development model