Case Study: Expanded Access Community Portal

Expanded Access Organization Introduction

Expanded Access is a non-profit organization determined to extend the benefits of the digital age to disadvantaged communities by enhancing community awareness, options and increased access to essential services. Special focus is placed on health care, education, social services, jobs, government services, and local business products and services, using information and communication technology (ICT).

Wild Web Widget is developing Expanded Access' Community Portal, which will allow users to find information on topics ranging from health services and financial management to community announcements. Community focused portal web sites, broadband networks, home computers, an self-service kiosks are the type of access enablers found within Digital Empowerment Zones. Digital Empowerment Zones, among other things, facilitate digital access, efficient communication and collaboration between community residents and vital organizations such as hospitals, local and state government, schools and local business. The project is on schedule to go live this fall.

“I am very pleased!
Your team has done a great job!”
Nathaniel Bryant
President . Expanded Access, Inc.

Portal Details

The Portal is divided into Communities (e.g. Bronx and Brooklyn) and a Community Administrator is responsible for maintaining the pages of that community. A superuser can easily set up new communities as needed either using a template or copying from an existing community in the system. Each community has its own:

• Mail List Manager
• Calendar
• Bulletin Board
• Web pages
• Surveys
• News Feed
• Weather Feed

All these items are managed via a web-based control panel. The interface is simple to use and new administrators can be trained in less than half a day (previous experience using an online services like Hotmail helps).

The administrator can:

• Create, modify or delete web pages
• Post events on the community calendar
• Create surveys and polls and view tabulated response data
• View disk space used, number of users, page visits
• Administer the bulletin board and delete inappropriate entries

Users register on the site and can list areas of interest. This allows customized displays of the Calendar and newsfeeds as well as subscription to relevant mail lists. All user interaction with the portal is automatic allowing Community Administrators to concentrate on updating content.

Portal Technical Details

The portal is hosted on Windows 2003 running IIS 6.0. The web pages are either ASP or ASP.NET and connect to both MS Access and SQL Server databases. The Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used was Macromedia Dreamweaver 2004. Macromedia Flash was used to create the Flash introduction. The news feed and weather feed use XML to retrieve the feed data using standard RSS format.

The portal makes use of tried and tested WildWebWidget low-level components such as hashing functions, search functions and database interface functions.

The portal is designed to be initially hosted on shared hosting and then upgraded to dedicated hosting as the user base grows. It is estimated the shared hosting can support 10,000 users. Upgrading the SQL Server to a dedicated database can provide a further performance boost if needed. This ability to scale provides significant savings during the early life of the portal.

For more information and answers for specific situations, please send an inquiry (we do not list an email to prevent spam).