Product Design of a Virtual Collaboration Tool

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 emai.

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. 

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

• Demonstrate a working prototype in 2 months:
  • 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 short span of time.
• Complete product life cycle management of a fairly complex product:
  • The key differentiators 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.

The Solution

• Prototype Development

  ennovate did deliver prototype called “Thunder” within two months and before the show. This ”Thunder” demonstrated 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 the customer, ennovate worked on first production release of Thunder. Responsibilities included designing & architecting the software, development and testing.

• Testing

  ennovate’s QA team ensured the project is delivered with high quality and with zero critical defects. Test team was involved in creating test plans, test cases for each feature of Thunder. They executed test cases and maintained defects in bug tracking tool.

• Porting to multiple OS

  Although Thunder Easel is supporting to work on Windows XP only, Thunder Customer 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 task of sustaining and maintaining Thunder software.

  Since February 2006 ennovate is maintaining “Thunder”. ennovate played a major role in adding new features and fix defects. Since Thunder development was started at ennovate, three versions of Thunder have been released to end-users. We are currently working on fourth release of “Thunder software”.

• Release Management

  ennovate technologies manages release management for Thunder software. Major responsibilities include preparing setup for releases and managing all major and patch releases to be done for customer’s end 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(All editions) and Mac OS X, Windows Server 2003, Cocoa

The Benefit

• Customer was able to showcase a working prototype for InfoComm 2005. Subsequently it bagged “Best innovative product of the year” award at the tradeshow
• Customer achieved greater end user experience and cost saving
  • Through improved quality of the software and drivers
  • Adopting Flash based technology which gave product excellent aesthetics for User Interface / Animations and good product performance
• Huge savings on time and money for customer due to ennovate’s amplified offshore development model