Preducto produces and sell environmental educations on the internet. Customers can buy licenses for a course and invite students to complete the course. LRT handles all the administration such as license handlng, students course status, diploma printout etc.
Johan at Preducto contacted me early in 2008 with the idea of a having an internet based system that could handle the administration of the internet educations that Preducto had produced and were selling. It turned out that Johan was a very good product owner as he took close part in the project. He had the mandate to answer any question I had, he also was very quick to reply. We discussed all parts of the system and quickly agreed on solutions that were quick to implement and robust to use.
This was the first ASP.NET system that I architected and coded completely, I was the only IT-guy in the project. I decided to use MySQL for database handling. I had knowledge of both SQL Server and MySQL but since MySQl was free, and Preductos ISP supported MySQL, it was the better choice. When I designed the database I tried to keep the number of tables to a minimum with simple relations between the tables. I knew that we in 2008 did not know what the end product would look like in a couple of years since the creative atmosphere was high in the project, so I decided not to overarchitect the design. This proved to be the rigjht way to go, we have not made more than minor changes to the original database, even though a lot of functionality has been added to the system during the years.
We decided on an intricate use of cookies so that the already produced courses could communicate with LRT without major rewrites.
The number of customers, students and courses have grown, so we added more and more do-it-yourself functionality in order to reduce the administrative burden on Preductos personnel. It is now possible for a student to self-register for a course. Customers can also easily buy course licenses, pay on PayPal with their credit card and immediately start the courses.
Technical environment: .NET 4.0, C#, ASP.NET 4.0, Javascript, MySQL
