Speaker Portal with Streaming Audio/Video

Grigon Communications, Inc. (GCI) USA, is an eLearning and custom software service provider. It provides consulting and development services to clients in the US in the areas of information design, communication strategies, technical solutions, new media, and eLearning.

GCI wanted to develop a speaker training portal for a leading pharmaceutical company in the US.

Material hosted on the portal needed to be consistently and continuously accessible to speakers attending conferences and sessions at various geographical locations.

The portal's content included video-based presentations, synched with PowerPoint presentations with user controls. The portal supports many other document formats such as PPT, DOC, PDF, SWF, and Audio files.

The client wanted a strong backend function through which most of the user side could be made dynamic. At the same time, administrators of the portal needed to be able to control and track access to the site by defining privileges for both users and administrators.

Bandwidth sensitivity was a requirement as many of the users would not always have access to a high-speed connection. In the case of a dial-up connection, the user could change their preferences and stream audio only versions of the presentations.

An extensive audit trail and tracking was required. An exhaustive report module was created. In addition, an extensive custom report builder was needed to help the administrator create any desired report.

Browser compatibility was a key requirement. The portal is compatible with Safari (NO MAC), Mozilla Firefox, and Internet explorer for the PC.

The Upside Learning team recommended a solution architected with ASP.NET and MySQL for the technical architecture and an Adobe Flash based Training Delivery Player for streaming audios or videos and synching PowerPoint presentations.

The main focus of the solution was to design a robust database since almost the entire user side was dynamic and access was permissions-based depending on a variety of parameters.

Our team produced a quality solution and was able to successfully launch the final site within the agreed timeframe.

The site has been running successfully for the last 5 months and has now been replicated with some changes for one of the client's other divisions.

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