Project Overview

Miura was invited by the Innovations Department within KCC to undertake a two fold project. Part one was to take on two young high school students as apprentice web designers to train and mentor them as they assisted us with the second part of the project which was to design an online system offering vocational courses throughout Kent to students from 13 years of age upwards.

The site had to support the curriculum framework, raise awareness of the variety of vocational and academic courses available, provide information about every single subject, and inspire youngsters to apply. Additionally the online system would have to offer information on all educational centers within Kent, and allow these centers (i.e. schools, vocational centers, colleges, etc) the ability to add, remove, edit or amend their respective areas within it.

The requirements of this project brought with it many new challenges . The first part of the project required that we Introduce the students to Miura's working methodologies and mentor them through the various phases of a project lifecycle.

In every phase of the second part, designing the online career choice system, it was necessary for us to align the project outcome to meet all WCAG 'level A' and as many 'level AA' compliance checkpoints as possible.

In addition, KCC needed a single, modular, and configurable technology platform to support all stakeholders and their partners including every school, vocational and educational center in Kent.

THE SOLUTION

SharePoint was a requirement; this meant every piece of functionality had to be delivered via SharePoint. However as KCC uses SharePoint to deliver the Kent Learning Zone this meant that it would integrate seamlessly. It also meant that so long as each component followed the established SharePoint Best Practices then the requirements for Security, Scalability, Performance and Auditing had already been met, again reducing the total cost to the client.

The Controlled deployment of the system using Microsoft best practices of Solutions and Features meant that KCC could easily create user acceptance testing systems and thus be assured of the quality of the live rollout. It also meant that reusable components could be used to quickly assemble new sites as required at a much lower cost to the user.

Requirement Driven Design (RDD) was implemented so that continuous small releases allowed the system to be changed as the users requirements changed but that there was always a fully working release available.

Flash was integrated directly into SharePoint to enhance the user experience by providing suitable animations.

SharePoint does not offer Video Streaming so a custom Field type was implemented that allowed streaming videos to be added to any base SharePoint list. This functionality was used within the site but was also available for use in other KCC SharePoint sites.