Social Networking Platform for Colleges and Non Profit

Development of Custom Social Networking Site for Colleges and Non Profit

Company profile

The customer strives to be the platform for communication, information, and personalization for every college campus in the nation. They provide exceptional mobile content, personalized information updates, organizational accounts, and targeted marketing to create a complete college solution to connect the student body, faculty and staff, alumni, parents, and the surrounding nonprofit community.

Business situation

The customer needed a web-based Social Networking Platform that helps individuals and groups to connect with friends, former college students, and others who study, work and live around them to enhance and improve their community environment and life quality.

The developed social networking solution

The Portal provides communication, information, and marketplace services to individuals, groups and organizations. The Social Networking System includes a unique set of functions, frameworks and an assembly of software functions that enable group interaction based on the connections between people and that make communication and networking more effective and relevant. The primary communications methods include PC web, mobile web, widgets, email and mobile messaging.

The Social Networking/E-Commerce system:

• Provides platform that gives people the power to share, to socialize, to meet others who know others, and makes the world more open, more flexible and more connected.

• Provides unique framework to help individuals, groups and organizations get plugged in and stay connected.

• Provides single place that help people to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and keep events from various groups and organizations on one automatically and continuously updated calendar, and learn more about the people they meet.

• Provides a way to join former, current and future college students by passing on knowledge and information learned while at college.

• Creates and manages a fully functioning online market framework.

Social Networking/E-Commerce Web Portal is developed as Web-based application to manage individuals, groups and organizations, and their connections, and provide an easy but powerful framework to fulfill main social networking, marketplace and communication functions:

• Community Management: Framework to support the creation and management of communities including community member and web-site management, community schedule management, community calendar and events notifications, community marketplace management, and other community features;

• Organization Management: Framework to support the creation and management of organizations including organization member, web-sites and widgets management, organization's members fees and other charges management, organization's event management including common calendars, scheduling event notifications, management of members communications, forums, discussions board, chat-rooms and other organization's services;

• Member Management: Framework with full set of features to support individual members: creation and management of individual web-pages, personal market place and storage management, personal contact management and other individual members features;

• Message Management: Framework with full set of features to message exchanging including address book, selecting target audience and importance, reminders, various notifications, message store management;

• Information Management: Framework to support common information services such as individual, group and organization news and general interest information services, forums, calendar, scheduling and event notifications, appointment scheduling and reminders, polling, voting, inquiry and other sources of information provides through Social Networking System on a free or paid subscription basis;

• Digital Media Management: Framework to manage and deliver digital media such as individual and group photos, video, music, documents and other digital file formats include Microsoft office related formats.

• Marketplace Management: Framework to provide next functions and services to merchandise, promote, and sell products and services:

  • Merchant Catalogs Management - to create and manage on-line catalogs for products and services.
  • Merchant Transactions Management - to authorize and process on-line payment methods' transactions (credit card, e-checks, etc.), and preparing reports
  • Merchandising and Promotion Management - to manage the market space and promotional campaigns, prepare promotion report and track market results.
  • Shopping Cart Management - to show products and subtotals by Market, add Sales tax and cost, pickup or shipping method, pickup instructions / directions for each market;
    
    

    

  • Advertising Management Framework - to create, edit, and manage highly targeted ad campaigns including reporting and monitoring tools to analyze ad campaigns in real time.
    
    

    

Benefits

SoloSoft has extensive experience in Web application development including Social Network Portal and e-Commerce System development expertise. The Agile project methodology provides early and continuous delivery of valuable software together with quick positive response to changing requirements. Based on this project the customer started a new project to extend the functionality and spread the technology and expertise to another audience.

Products and Services Used

The following tools were used to develop the social networking platform for colleges:

• ER model development: Sybase Power Designer
• PHP IDE and debug tool: Nusphere PHPEd
• Source and version control: Subversion
• Bug Tracking System: Mantis 1.1.1

Third party products and classes were integrated in this solution:

• Google Data API
• MCE WYSIWYG editor
• Swfupload control
• DHL API
• Fedex API
• USPS API
• UPS API
• Paypal API
• GrabYahoo class
• xlsWriter class
• ABC Excel Parser Pro
• PEAR library
• GD2 PHP library
• Wacko Wiki engine
• PHPBB 3 forum engine
• iLoop API
• Vista gadgets API
• Google Widgets
• Yahoo Widgets

Additional specific features were implemented:

• Union entities logic
• Connections between all system entities (links/security/preferences)
• Shipping logic
• Separated markets (shopping cart and reports)
• Xml data export
• Outlook synchronization (both directions)
• CSS html makeup
• Bulk files upload

Technology/Quality Details

• Approx number of lines of source code (excluded phpBB, Wacko Wiki and widgets) - 138, 000 lines in 861 files (5.49 MB)

• Total numbers of defects in Bug Tracking System - 482 defects [ 11 P1 defects and 37 P2 defects (Priority-1 and Priority-2)]

• Defect Density: about 4 defects per 1000 lines of code [For reference: very high quality software - up to 10 defects per 1000 lines of code]