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CareerGuidanceIndia.com is India's unique edu-portal
dedicated exclusively to careers, education, information and guidance.
CareerGuidanceIndia is promoted by the Caring (an organization
dedicated for career guidance.). A Career Counselor with more
than 12 years of experience, Pervin Malhotra heads CARING, a career
information and guidance project as its Director. Besides providing
on-site counseling, she answers viewer's queries every week on
DD1 and Z-TV as well as on AIR FM. Her regular columns are a popular
feature in The Times of India, The Tribune, The Telegraph, Malayalam
Manorma The Deccan Herald and Cosmopolitan among others.
Caring choose Icreon as it's partner in the venture of launching
it's own web site and development of offline systems that are
tight integrated with their online presence. |
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The client wanted to develop a centralized
integrated solution which helps Caring in answering the queries
received form diversified sources and medium such as site, email,
and post. Challenge was to treat each query differently, based
upon its origin. Based upon the origin the content and the treatment
of query was different. For example a query received through post or
through a particular newspaper would carry a different customized
answer if compared to a query received through the Internet.
The other challenge was the development of a user-friendly retrieval
system for already answered queries. The client wanted to have
a system that would allow cross-reference of queries
with previously answered queries, thereby reducing the net work
required in answering similar queries. These answers are currently
stored as a word document and Icreon was faced with the to
store all the data in the 1000 page word document into a database,
which could be updated frequently.
More over queries were to be categorized and distributed in such
a way that each domain expert received queries relevant to his
domain only. In case a query was received that did not fall under
any of the existing domains - an option was to be provided to
the administrator to create a new category.
The biggest challenge of course was that the client had to be
migrated carefully from the existing system to the other with
zero downtime. Considering that this was an operational company
handling more than 5000 student queries each month, this itself
proved to be quite a challenge. |
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A central browser based query management
system for queries was built; queries originating from various
sources and mediums are tagged so as to be treated differently.
Based upon the requirement three users levels were identified,
which were given different levels of access. Super administrator
was able to view reports of queries, sub admins, add to answer
bank, publish new answers. Middle admin is empowered to do all
the administrative functions such as downloading, uploading, distribution
of queries and many others.
For easy retrieval of answers all the answers were tagged with
the relevant keywords and assigned a category. Full text indexing
was used to provide the user-friendly search, which showed up the
answers sorted on the basis of relevancy.
For distribution of queries a comprehensive logic was built in;
using this, the super administrator is able to assign a query to
more than one category, prioritize them and also assign the maximum
limit, reaching which queries are then distributed to the next
expert in that domain.
The complete system was designed in such a way that full site
is linked with a common thread of category. It is really useful
to do cross linking on the site and give that extra to the visitors,
for example a student looking for a medical course can also find
out the deadlines of relevant institutes +books on the selected
industry along with the course details. |
| Solution Highlights: |
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Each synchronization between
queries received online and offline |
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User need not be online
to answer queries |
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Any number of work stations
are supported, repeat installations are not required. High-end systems are also not required |
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Advanced Reporting |
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Customized user levels |
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Full text search |
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Browsed-based solution was provided using ASP
as scripting platform, COM (business logic was hidden using com
built in Visual basic), XML and SQL Server 2000. Being browser-based solution, it can support "n" number of work stations and does
not need to be installed every time a user is added.
Full text Indexing and query features were used to give the enhanced
search facilities. XML support in MS SQL 2000 and other advanced
features were used to make online and offline data transfer a
seamless process. |
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