Case study: ITC services for LCMM with Complete Genius
Complete Genius Ltd are a London-based company who specialise in designing educational websites. During the summer of 2001 they were contracted to create a dynamic, database-driven intranet website for staff and students of the London College of Music and Media (LCMM) and they, in turn, hired Surfability Ltd in October 2001 to assist them with this task. The intranet has some 1200 dependent users.
The Surfability solution for Complete Genius involved:
- Installing a private network allowing users to share a single IP address on a leased line connection to the internet.
- Installing Red Hat Linux, a PHP enabled web server (Apache), Tomcat (a Java Servlet Engine) and Samba (windows file sharing) on a new PC resulting in a stable, reliable solution for software development and file hosting to their network of Macintosh (OS 9/X) and Windows workstations.
For the LCMM intranet we did the following:
- Wrote software to download updated student and staff details on a daily basis from an external database server and use this information to update the various courses, modules and student profiles stored in the LCMM intranet database server.
- Developed the navigability, added moderator functions, and tidied up the skeletal framework of the LCMM intranet student forums. (These forums, which were built using PHP, serve as an online area where students and tutors can discuss aspects of a given course module. Each course has its own forum and every student taking that course can post messages to it.)
"It was a pleasure working with Surfability. They quickly got to grips with the problem, and then cracked on with the solution. I will definitely use their services again!"
Stephen Todd, Managing Director, Complete Genius Ltd.