The future of learning is through rich media like Webcasts and podcasts.

New technologies are emerging at a faster pace than companies can swallow. In the last 4 years Microsoft has released three versions of .Net Framework, two Versions of Visual Studio, two versions of Microsoft Office and four versions of Silverlight. For obvious reasons Microsoft wants to evangelize all of these new technologies and System Integrator Partners want to learn and use these new technologies to increase efficiency and productivity of the company.

Microsoft community Portal (MCP) is a portal developed by Indigo Architects for Microsoft which helps them effectively evangelize and enable new technologies at most of its SI partners. Essentially MCP is a repository of technical and business resources made available to various partner like Infosys, Wipro, HCL, CTS etc through rich streaming media like Videos and Podcasts.

Challenges and solutions

• Content Size:

  MCP is basically a Digital Asset Management Software and more, as the main requirement of MCP was to make manage and deliver rich media about new technology to all partners. One of the major problem was that as the content start becoming richer the size of the content also starts increasing(~1GB) which poses a bandwidth problem for downloading of such content. So a local instance of MCP was installed at each partner on its intranet, and a primary site was installed on the web which used to act as the master site controlling the content and configuration of all the partner sites.

• Synchronization:

  As this became an intranet portal, SharePoint which is the most used intranet application development tool was used.

  New content (webcasts, Podcast, docs etc) were uploaded at the primary either by a job or manually. After upload content management workflow (Encode, Tag, Clean) was applied to the new content.

  The local instance of MCP at the partner side used to sync with the primary everyday and download the new content at night so that it is available to users by morning. To make sure that duplicate content is not downloaded we used SharePoint content Migration API coupled with our custom WCF web service.

• Presentation:
  

  Once the content had been downloaded it had to be presented to users in a way that it is easy for them to find and they can also collaborate on it. For the UI or the frontend we used standard ASP.NET website which connected to the SharePoint as a Data provider. Search Server Express was used as the search provider which used to index all the content and gave search out of the box. Only showing content is not enough so collaboration was added to the portal. Users can add comments, ratings, feedback which was shared between all the users. User can also customize what they want to see on home page by adding preferences for specific categories. Alerts were made part of portal so that the user can get to know all the new content of all the categories that they have subscribed to.

• Reports:

  The content is synchronized and now presented to the user in a friendly and beautiful way. But no portal is complete without reports, also this being a multi deployment installation the reports had to be collected and shown at one particular place. So all the data of usage were collated and uploaded to the primary every day by again using SharePoint content Migration API. So reports for all partners are now at one place and can be presented to the necessary stakeholders.

Hence came in being Microsoft Community Portal (MCP) using which you can send rich content to scores of different partners. The users at the partners can like view, search, rate, customize, share, comment etc. Everything the users does is then logged and uploaded to a central server where all stakeholders can view and analyze it.