Canterbury Christ Church University .NET Case Study |
Business ChallengeThe University's existing student portal is a largely static site and lacked any dynamic features or an effective way to personalise communication with individual students. The current portal lacked facilities to allow students to interact with the multiple faculties and departments in the University, and this was seen as an essential shortcoming when Canterbury reviewed development needs. The new portal also needed to allow students to undertake basic administrative tasks online, such as change of address and study fee payment. SolutionCanterbury Christ Church University commissioned Ballard Chalmers to develop the new Student.NET Internet portal, based on their reputation as a .NET development specialist with in-depth experience in the creation of large scale website applications. The University mandated that Student.NET was to be no ordinary portal. It needed to be based on the latest technology to ensure acceptance by students used to accessing the latest social networking sites, plus be perceived as smooth and slick in its graphical design. The home page needed to be fully customisable, with drag and drop web-parts or "widgets", colour scheme selection and a collection of other widgets tailored to each student's needs. Each student also needed be able to create a personalised home page to meet their preferences, in a style similar to that used on www.bbc.co.uk and www.iGoogle.com. The new portal needed to be scalable, fast, flexible and graphically rich, demands which resulted in a number of technical challenges which were solved by the Ballard Chalmers team using a highly optimised web application based on .NET and AJAX. Technology
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