Online Collaboration Network

  • Robust online research and innovation platform
  • Collaboration tool for communities
Expertise
Web & Enterprise Portals
Content & Document Management
Verticals
Consulting

One of the leading co-creation agencies hires Iflexion to develop a collaborative online research and innovation platform to bring brand owners and target audiences closer together.

Calendar
8
Duration
Months
Gears
36
Efforts
Person-months

Context

Our Customer, C Space (formerly known as Promise Corporation) is one of the leading co-creation agencies and a pioneer in the field of co-creation. The requested platform creates prefiltered multiple streams of dialogue between companies and their audiences, uncovering new valuable insights between brand owners and target audiences in a way previously impossible to achieve. 

Solution

Iflexion created a scalable online platform which supports private online collaboration communities, where the simultaneous participation of thousands of employees (as well as customers, stakeholders, and experts) over an extended period of time leads to the debate, creation, and development of ideas.

The platform acts as a brand's personal 24/7 consumer advisory board, where constant contact with the relevant audience is carried out. Decisions with community involvement happen much faster and this way the time to market is greatly reduced. 

System Highlights

  • Flash-based collaboration system. It allows community participants to have real-time chats with the ability to draw and upload images and videos.
  • Email notification system. The community participants receive personalized notifications about all kinds of community events.
  • Customizable per community website design. With the use of external CSS, images, and script files the website design can be modified individually for every client without the involvement of the development team.
  • Intuitive user interface and easy navigation. The platform is easy to use and provides no confusion regarding its functionality.
  • High scalability. The community platform unites users across different countries and brands, collaborating on new products and services (with many of them working simultaneously online).
  • Innovative approach. Multiple stakeholders provide innovation and de-risk change, by driving innovation from within the organization.

Development Process

Iflexion business analysts visited the Customer’s company headquarters in London to gather all the requirements and understand the project outline better. As a result, the project plan and functional documentation were created.

The agile methodology was chosen for the development process in order to have frequent deployments and preserve quality with the ability to make changes in the specification based on the feedback from the early versions of the system. The Customer’s representatives visited Iflexion development center to evaluate system builds.

The required scope of functionality was split into 10 phases; after each phase we deployed the system for the Customer’s review.

Technologies

ASP.NET was used as the main technology platform for the system along with several highly customized third-party components and Microsoft entity framework as the data access layer. This significantly decreased development time and the amount of bugs found in the system.

Considering the performance requirements and complexity of the required user interface, Iflexion team proposed to use ASP.NET and Flash together with MS SQL database.

A set of native ISAPI extensions and filters for IIS were implemented in order to support multiple communities hosted on a single website with minimal performance penalty, use in-memory caching of media files and perform low-level tuning of HTTP caching compatibilities.

Results

The project was completed on time and budget. All the required functionality including the features requested during the development process was implemented. For less than one year six communities with several thousands of live users were setup for clients from United Kingdom, USA and Dubai.

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