Sector(s)
Project Summary:
This portal was developed from scratch by Pratham Software (PSI)
The portal is a content driven B2B social networking portal, where individuals, teams and organizations meet to publish information about various products, services, trends, events and businesses. This portal endeavours to connect individuals in the corporate domain and find relevant experts and partners of their specific interest areas.
This innovative portal facilitates the users and businesses to connect, interact, recommend each other, create & publish content. Besides, the portal allows multiple companies to come together to organize and conduct online events.
About the project
Project Details:
Goals:
To strategize and develop a content driven networking site for the client that caters to individual users as well as business groups, and enables them to connect, interact and share content.
Requirements:
The portal required features wherein users can subscribe to content keywords, individuals, companies and groups for getting the updates about content created within the keywords, by individuals, by companies and by groups. This also required individuals in the corporate domain to interconnect and find relevant experts and partners in their interest areas.
Solution approach:
• Discuss and create user stories from the requirements
• Sprint planning and identify user stories for current sprint
• Development and unit testing
• Sprint release and system testing
• Backlog management
• Load and Performance testing using Jmeter
Engagement Overview: Development
• Time to Market was important since client was looking to sell the idea by creating working prototype in a short duration. To achieve that we used Drupal Commons which has out of the box functionality for some key features like Multiuser group, Company and Subscribe/unsubscribe.
• Team Size: Pratham Software (PSI) assigned a dedicated team of designer, developers, business analyst and project manager.
• Since it was a project with constantly evolving requirements for faster development Agile Methodology was used.
QA Process
• Backlog management of customer facing defects
• System testing
• Bug logging in Team foundation server
• Close bugs after verification
• Browsers testing: including IE10 , FF and chrome
• Device testing: iPhone 6+, MotoG and iPad 4
• Load and Performance testing: using Jmeter
Key Project Challenges
• Translating concept into a working prototype within a short span of time
• Constantly evolving requirements
• All the database configurations were kept in the code
• Designing reusable components to help us to meet ‘Go to Market’ milestone
• Designing the features module in such a way that field base created for one entity can be used as field instance for another entity
• Developing view support for the custom entities
• Selection of the most appropriate module
• Customizing ‘Drupal Commons’ to cater to business needs
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal Commons is the most popular drupal distribution for developing networking websites, it is the only distribution which has out of the box functionality for features like Groups, Messaging and Events. Organic Groups enable platform users to create and manage their own company and groups. Each company or group can have administrator, members, and subscribers. Groups can be categorized into two categories open and closed where open groups are accessible to everyone and closed groups can only be accessed by members. Flags module enable users to subscribe, send friend requests and save article/ group/company/ user for future reference.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
We used Commons (commons-7.x-3.3) over Drupal 7.23 for its out of the box functionality for features like a Groups, Messaging and Events. The Organic Groups(OG) enable users to create and manage their own groups.
