Web-based Presentation Management System John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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1 Web-based Presentation Management System John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Final Report December 21, 2001 Development Team of NYU Eric Xi Lu Iftikhar Rafi Anil Singh Jie Zhang Professor Arthur Goldberg Wiley s Management Team Thomas Speyer, Director of Interactive application development Catherine Beckman, Senior Online Marketing Manager

2 Part I. Project Review 1. Background Wiley is a global publisher of print and electronic products, specializing in scientific, technical, and medical books and journals; professional and consumer books; subscription services; textbooks and other educational materials for undergraduate; graduate students as well as lifelong learners. The company provides "must-have" content to targeted communities of interest. Wiley's deep reservoir of quality content, constantly replenished, offers a tremendous source of competitive advantage. Technology is making this content more accessible to customers worldwide and is adding value for them by delivering it in interactive and/or fully searchable formats. A DemoCentral site was developed for Wiley by outside developers to allow Wiley s sales representatives to demonstrate a range of CDs products to prospective customers without having to have the CDs and to remember the demo scripts. 2. Goals Our goal is to develop a web-based tool at the administration level to create startfinish tours and topic tours for the purpose of DemoCentral web site, and to modify the existing navigation system of the Demo site to be more flexible, powerful and user friendly. It is crucial to the success of DemoCentral that it is easy to learn and use because of the number and variety of products each representative sells. Wiley will gain with the web-based presentation management system, as it will increase sales of Wiley eproducts and visibility of Wiley Higher Education in the E- marketplace. Wiley development group will also gain an insight into the limitations of current technologies. With these constraints in mind they will be able to give a fresh direction to their future technical development strategy. Revenue: Internet offer provides opportunity for additional revenue. Market share: Opportunity to attract more customers with the enhanced online feature. First Mover Advantage: No other company currently provides such a mature service. Costs: Marketing cost will be decreased in the future because less mail promotion is needed.

3 3. Technology Development Environment: Operating System Windows NT/95/98 Programming Java ( JDK v1.2) Languages Java Server Pages JavaScript Java Data Base Connectivity (JDBC) Application Server Apache TomCat v3.2.3 Database Server MySQL v3.23 System Architecture 4. Accomplishment We achieve our goals to create the online tools, which allow the authors to select an image from the CD and enter a title and comments. Once the user clicks Save, the title+image+comment gets saved into the database. The authors are able to create both types of tours start-to-finish as well as topic tour to cater to the features of tour the CD in DemoCentral. After creating a tour, authors are able to preview the tour and make change such as re-arrange the order of slides, or delete a slide. We also modify the existing navigation system of viewing the tours to make the interface more user-friendly, as well as easier to use. We also leave room for Wiley s development group for future improvements and functionality expansion, because of the OOP paradigm we followed during the implementation process.

4 In our system, we have two sets of JSPs. The first set-viewtour.jsp is used for running / viewing the tour. This JSP takes a product ID as an input and pass that to the JavaBean to get the list of tours and their details. And second set- CreateTour_*.jsp is used for creating the tour. All the collected detail about the tour will be held in the memory of the JavaBean and once the user presses the Save button; a bean method will be called to save all the data. This architecture provides a faster response time. 5. Installation process In order to transfer the development work to Wiley s, so they can further work on the application, we have created a CD, which contains the following Components: /config: This directory contains all the configuration files for the project. o /TomCat/server.xml: This is the server configuration file for the TomCat o /wiley/dbproject/source.wiley This is the database configuration file, which contains all the properties for the JDBC connection /development software: This directory contains all the free software we used for the development process. o /MySQL/mysql win.zip This is the installation file for the MySQL database server o /MySQL/mysqlgui-win32-static zip This is the installation file for the MySQL GUI Admin o /MySQL JDBC Driver/mysql.jar This is the JDBC driver for MySQL database o /TomCat/Jakarta-tomcat zip This is the installation file for the TomCat /source code: This directory contains all the source code we created for the prototype o /sql: This folder contains all the files we used to create the database schema (crebas.sql), and insert the sample data (crerows.sql) o /wiley/ This folder contains all the source files for the web site: /cd_images : This folder contains all the sample CD images /images: This folder contains all the images files used by the webpages, such as icons /jsp : This folder contains all the jsp pages /Web-inf : This folder contains all the java beans classes 6. Remaining work Security Due to the time limit, we are not count in the security issues which will only allow authorized personnel to access the creation part of the show and registered users to view the show. And the security system we design should not conflict with the existing

5 system of Wiley. So we feel like it s more feasible for to leave the security issue to Wiley s internal development group. Publishing demo show Due to not familiar with the IT infrastructure, we did not integrate the publishing demo show function. The production deployment procedure will be determined by the Interactive Application group, which could be either done manually or using the webdeployment script.

6 Part II. Project Recommendations 1. Executive Summary This report represents our final recommendations for improvements in the design and usability of Demo Central. Since the product is expected to be used by a diverse set of employees at differing level of technical know-how and flexibility, emphasis on user friendliness is a prime concern. Likewise all the following recommendations focus on simplifying the process of creation of a slide show, and don t require installation of any new hardware components. Recommendation #1: Customizable User Interface Presently Demo Central supports a static user interface and does not provide any customization. However due to the separation of program logic and presentation that has been designed into the product, a design component/module can be written that enables users to personalize the user interface. Recommendation #2: Mapping Component After creating a slide show, to upload the show to the Web Server, Demo Central expects the user the to manually map all the images on the local drive to the web server. For a few images this routine is acceptable, however for a 30 image slide tour uploading the image files manually can be cumbersome. Since all the meta-data pertaining to a slide is present in the database, a software component can be written to automate this mapping process. Recommendation #3: Security/ Authorization Demo Central does not provide any authorization or authentication scheme to limit access. In other words there are no computer security protocols embedded in the product to check and record the actions of the users. As the slide shows are primarily for marketing purposes, which makes them information sensitive, implementing such a protocol would be helpful. Recommendation #4: Multiple User Since Demo Central is designed to be a web based presentation management system it should take into consideration the effect of multiple users editing the same tour. If all these recommendations are implemented successfully, Demo Central can emerge as a quality product that can be used across a diverse employee base. Since elaborate documentation and process flow schemes have been provided, the implementation of these improvements should not exceed 90 man hours.

7 2. Slide Show Creation Procedure The process of creating a slide show can be divided into the following three phases. Phase 1: The user copies all the images pertaining to a product, that he/she intends to convert to a slide, in a directory on the host computer/server. Phase 2: The user uses Demo Central to construct slides from these images to create a tour. The final tour can then be uploaded to the web server. Phase 3: After uploading the tour, the user manually copies all the images, pertaining to all the slides of the tour, to the web server. Note: The user only needs to copy the images for which there is a corresponding slide in any of the tours. If any such image is deleted or renamed the slide show will fail. 3. Recommendations: Recommendation #1: Customizable User Interface Adoption of a new technology or a software solution, expected to be used across various departments in an organization, is usually met with unforeseen resistance. A major source of this apprehension is a conflict between the user interface of the current system being used by the employees and that of the new product. Studies have shown that users are not likely to read elaborate help documents or even written cues on the screen. The modern day technology-savvy computer user tries to matches the user interface of the new product with that of some previously used software, with minor differences explained through visual cues. Therefore it makes sense to customize a product s user interface to match it with the system being currently used by the end-users. Demo Central has been intuitively designed to separate the program presentation from the underlying logic. Therefore the HTML code that defines the user interface can be changed to come up with a completely new look-and-feel without any impact on the JSP code, that handles the program logic. Above all, this customization can be achieved through a software component that generates this HTML code. With such a system in place a user will be able to create a user interface that most suits his/her own requirements. Recommendation #2: Mapping Component The final slide show produced by Demo Central is essentially a JSP files that accesses an underlying database to find the meta-data corresponding to every slide in the slide show.

8 This meta-data in turn consists of the location of the image files that, at the time of creation are located on local host/server. However when uploaded to the web-server, the current system requires the user to manually uploaded all the image files, for which a corresponding slide exists, to the web server. Secondly, as the data base stores the absolute path of the image i.e it also includes the name of the directory, a matching directory will also have to be created on the web server. For small tours consisting of a few slides, manually copying the slides to the web server might not pose a problem, however for a large number of images such a scheme can be exhausting. In addition to that the user will also have to ensure that all such images are neither deleted nor renamed, as in such a case the tour will generate a file not found error. Therefore a mapping program that automatically maps the local directory onto the webserver, and manages these images i.e. deletion, renaming and copying, would improve both user friendliness and maintenance effort. Such a program should automatically: Identify all the images that need to be uploaded and upload them. Create a new directory if a corresponding directory does not exist on the web server. Notify the user if an image file, currently associated with a slide, is renamed or deleted. Recommendation #3: Security/ Authorization As mentioned above the Demo Central will be used to create slide tours that would enable Wiley & Sons to market their product to potential customers. Therefore it would be reasonable to assume that these slide tours are information critical i.e. any erroneous alteration to a tour due to error or mal-intent can cause severe damage. Currently Demo Central provides no security but nevertheless it makes sense to develop an authentication/ authorization system that not only determines access to the system but also records the operations performed by the user. A better approach would be to record a level of a detail, descriptive enough to enable a roll back of the most recent changes. In this sense a version control system can be built into an authentication protocol to enable easy and efficient content maintenance. Recommandation #4: Multiple User In accordance with the requirements of the management team at John Wiley, Demo Central was not designed to cater to simultaneous multiple access. However if this product has to be used seamlessly across the world wide web, by a variety of users in different geographical locations and time zones, there is a possibility that multiple users might edit the same tour simultaneously. Such a situation would lead to confusion and chaos, and hence locking and queuing mechanisms need to be designed for conflict avoidance and resolution.

9 4. Conclusion Demo Central was not built as a general purpose online presentation management system catering every conceivable application. The main intent was to create a working prototype that could subsequently be enhanced by developers, with minimal efforts. In our opinion if the above mentioned recommendations are implemented Demo Central can emerge as a major asset to John Wiley from both the technical and business strategic point of view.