CHALLENGE
An information portal should support the following main functions:
- Placing of information materials - editing of materials, publishing, automatic archiving
- Search of information materials - full text search, search by fields
- Viewing of information materials - feedback on materials, function “My Favorites”, function “Marketing Materials”, function “Personnel”
- User notification
The information portal should also meet high requirements for assigning user rights access:
- An option to integrate contact center employees into user groups to be assigned user rights access
- An option to hide information from employees who do not have access
The portal should be integrated with the related systems:
- Genesys Software
- Yandex maps
- Active Directory
- JUST
The information portal should provide the following reports:
- Statistics of documents read by portal users
- A report showing portal documents that are most commonly read
- A report showing the most active portal users
- A report showing materials that are compulsory for reading
The customer was not satisfied with the quality of imported information materials into the system by standard libraries (in particular, scale distortion, image loss, emergence of artifacts). As a result, the import module was significantly reworked to provide the customer with the desired import quality.
SOLUTION
To solve the set task, the portal solutions were analyzed, and, as a result, the corporate portal Liferay was chosen. Having researched the market of interactive learning systems, Artezio’s engineers chose OLAT, a system with an open source code. This system solved all the tasks set by the customer but required some rework of the interface and integration with the information portal.
According to requirements set forth to protect the information from unauthorized access, the user authentication subsystem under the Kerberos protocol was implemented, and the system of user access rights based on groups was developed.
Spring Portlet MVC and JavaScript were used for the development of the user interface. The application business logic was created with the help of Spring framework. The Hibernate technology was chosen to access data. For search of information materials, the Lucene library was applied.
The system allows effective training of new employees, their testing, and assessment of learning efficiency. For work with learning materials, the system provides a built-in editor and also allows materials to be imported in formats such as Word, Excel, RTF, HTML and uses images in GIF, JPEG, PNG formats. It also supports international formats such as SCORM and AICC.
Moreover, the system allows the use of interactive materials with the help of Java Applet, ActiveX, Macromedia flash as well as the use of video and audio fragments. It is also possible to integrate learning material into courses and the reuse of materials that have already been created in new courses.
The reporting system is able to access the assessment of both single users and training groups.
RESULTS
Currently, the system supports simultaneous work of about 200 users of the technical service center. The system allows the processing of about one million documents with no drop in performance and the search indexing of large volumes (about 12Gb) of text information.
