Meeting Room Manager

 Executive Summary

Our customer is a leader in innovation for interactive presentation products and collaboration tools.



Based on past experience of working with eInfochips, customer outsourced complete design & development of meeting room manager to eInfochips. The Meeting Room Manager can be used to schedule meetings, reserve meeting rooms and invite attendees and it is imperative to have a tool that allows to reserve/schedule/cancel conference rooms through web on any floor without leaving your desk in a 50 storey tall buildings in Manhattan or Tokyo or San Francisco.
The primarily objective of eInfochips’ association was to carry out this product design & development and sustenance & maintenance of the meeting room manager after release. eInfochips carried out hardware design, driver development and application development. It is based on AMD Geode processor and involved peripherals Ethernet and Touch screen LCD. eInfochips also carried out complete software design & development.

The Customer

A leader in bringing innovation to interactive presentation products and collaboration tools. From traditional whiteboards and chalkboards, to interactive whiteboards and presentation tools for the Education, Corporate, Government and Military markets, our customer's products are widely accepted globally.
The customer has developed a Room Scheduler product which can be used to reserve meeting rooms, schedule meetings and invite attendees through its own user interface or through web in conjunction with a server.

 The Challenge

  • Understanding the existing product in absence of any documentation.
  • Incorporate email functionality to enable automatic delivery of meeting notes to individual participants captured during the meeting by a different device. The application was built on legacy framework using legacy language which left no room for implementing this functionality. This was a very critical functionality, because the attendees used to forget downloading the notes manually.
  • Enable SSL based remote communication between exchange server and the product through a connector, which worked only locally and that too without SSL encryption.
  • Enhancements as well as testing were required to be completed in a very short span of time.

The Solution

Design & Development     

Team eInfochips carried out complete design & development of meeting room manager with following.

  • Complete product design including hardware, firmware and application integration
  • AMD Geode Processor based Hardware Design with FCC certification
  • Porting embedded Linux 2.6.x and driver development
  • Driver development for Touch screen LCD with X11 support
  • Integration of Meeting room manager with CopyCam – a device to capture notes from whiteboard and email to participants
  • Addition of features - time zone capability, support for 100BaseT Ethernet
  • Offshore technical support and maintenance
  • Online Firmware Up gradation

Software Development

The product's Clustered Exchange Connector was developed to support communication between the product and Exchange server remotely on clustered environment.

  • It also supports SSL, Caching mechanism and Exchange Server 2000/2003/2007
  • The software supports English, French & Spanish languages
  • The Software lends support to an integrated camera that senses the number of attendees in a meeting room. This number is displayed on the external Unit as well as to all attendees paged by the software. The meeting time commences as and when the number becomes non-zero. This feature is called Room Sensor.
  • Information transmitted through the software utilizes the medium of internet, rendering it vulnerable to malicious acts. To ensure information fidelity and security, SSL has been introduced which enables data encryption and decryption at transmitter and receiver ends.

Testing

eInfochips Testing Team created Test plans and executed test cases before release. The following tests were performed on the system:

  • Functional Test
  • UI test
  • Regression Test
  • Compatibility Test (to ensure software compatibility on two different hardware units)

For exchange server tests, we developed test plan and generalized test cases to test Exchange Server 2000/2003/2007 in simple and clustered environment.

Sustenance

eInfochips is responsible for solving customer issues and enhancing/adding features as per customer requirements related to:

  • Room scheduler product application (software related issues / feature enhancements with front panel and web interface).
  • Exchange connector (interface between Room scheduler and Microsoft Exchange server (standalone or cluster) to retrieve and/or schedule meetings from Microsoft Outlook).
  • Lotus Connector (interface between Room scheduler and Lotus Domino server to retrieve and/or schedule meetings from Lotus Notes).
  • eInfochips has been maintaining this product since January 2005 during which 10 major releases have been undertaken.

Release Management

eInfochips proposed a unique solution to automate the process of firmware tarball creations through cvs. We conceptualized a script that generates full tarball for the desired tag. Initially user had to run the patch manually by ssh/telnet to Device unit. With automation in place, user could now use the web interface for patch upgrade apart from firmware upgrades.
                               

Technology

  • AMD Processor
  • Core Java
  • Servlets
  • Linux
  • Lotus Script
  • ASP,Asp.Net 2.0
  • C# 2.0
  • Exchange Server 2000/2003/2007
  • XML

The Benefit

  • eInfochips team was able to drastically cut down team size as required by customer to enable smoother coordination and task handling despite the project being technically diverse. eInfochips offered fewer engineers who were able to support the range of technologies at ease.
  • Team eInfochips worked round the clock and proposed innovative solutions to enhance the product and give it an edge in the market ultimately making the product a Market Success.
  • Our clustered exchange server solution enabled remote access, improved performance with caching and enhanced security for the product. Also, with .Net based development, deployment can be done instantly as opposed to configuring the connecter with a large instruction set.