Staying in Touch

How do you keep an extended family together? How do you ensure that the knowledge and spirit of a community propagates through generations? An Indian community with a long history of leadership, courage and philanthropy found the answer - a Community website-portal that would ensure the longevity of not-to-be-forgotten.

About Client

Our Client is a community Trust. It has been running schools, hostels, old age homes, hotels and orphanages since 1990s. The Trust is engaged in promoting heritage tourism, placing, counseling services, matrimonial services, sponsoring events, funding student scholarships and providing financial assistance to the widows and the needy. The Trust maintains a genealogy of over 250,000 people.

The Need

With time and growing member population, it became difficult for the Trust to manage and run operations. The need for an electronic solution was felt, that would manage information with efficiency. Besides, it was realized that such a platform might be enhanced for enabling convenience of communication ad interaction within the community. What evolved was building a community portal that would:

- Bring community members from world over on a common platform
- Propagate community tradition and culture across generations
- Communicate the facilities and offerings of the Trust from a single broadcast-point
- Offer an e-commerce platform for small business units

Solution

Net4India was awarded the consulting and implementation work for "internet enabling" the concept. Based on the understanding of the Terms of Reference, the project managers designed the database structure; broke-down the project into phases and then into modules and finally awarded assignments to the project leaders and the team units. Each module of development was tested and documented in concurrence with their completion. The project entailed "active involvement" of Net4India in business-logic complementing. It was ensured that "concept drove the technology" rather than "technology dictating the concept". Specifically, challenge was to define a homogenous data structure that would cater to a heterogeneous community performing complex cross-functional operations. The projects teams of Net4India at Delhi and Hyderabad were assigned the responsibility of implementation.

A combination of programming languages was utilized to harness their best offerings. At the same smooth transition of data and sessions across them were ensured. The software was built on a Microsoft Windows platform using a combination of Java and ASP running an Microsoft SQL 7.0 database.

Advantage!

Today, the Trust's website receives hundreds of visitors. Some members in promoting businesses and services actively use the platform. These businesses are now able to manage and update their own content. One of the most popular section on the portal is the family-tree (genealogy map), where members may trace lineage - or add to them through a few simple clicks. The final solution is equally friendly to administrators as it is to the visiting members.