Hi I'm Chi Keen Low, I spent my time at Melbourne IT designing, implementing, testing and releasing the Subscription and Registration Tool.
Mentor
My mentor, Dr Trevor Hales, guided me in the direction of my project. He provided invaluable insights to the project and we discussed many different case studies to ensure the tool aimed at the generic subscription and registration market. The COM.AU registration bureau is a perfect for testing the Subscription and Registration Tool and I have to thank Clive Flory from the bureau for his time.
Proposed Research
SRT has automatic features which are aimed at service providers who manage lists of subscriptions and registrations of clients. SRT automatically extracts client details from various electronic forms. No manual data entry is required. Activities for service provided, such as printing address labels, are automatically performed. Renewal notices are automatically generated and followed up. Histories of clients are kept and retrieved when a lapsed subscription or registration is reactivated. With all the above features, SRT is better than keeping a list in a spreadsheet.
Actual Work Completed
The two months has been spent researching current products, collecting requirements specifications, designing the architecture, implementing a prototype, testing the prototype and documentation.
At the time of review, there are no competing products in the market. However, such a product must exist especially at licence registration bodies, sports clubs and magazine publishers. So these products must be proprietary written in-house applications. Many of these will probably not take advantage of the latest developments in software development and will possibly suffer from the impending millennium problem. SRT aim to become a commercially available robust product to provide for this market.
The core of SRT is multi-agent architecture, designed to handle the various processes in subscription and registration. The intelligent software agents are ideally suited for automated processes.
The SRT prototype is implemented as a stand-alone application incorporating its own graphical interface, intelligent agent logic and database. It is designed as a generic application for subscription and registration with easy maintenance and addition of extensions. A setup wizard dynamically customises SRT for the required tables and fields in a subscription or registration.
SRT has been tested for its operational profile and performance. SRT can be extended and customised easily for complex uses, especially for large corporations. A set of Application Programmer Interface (API) is documented for developers to customise SRT to their particular needs.
SRT has been extended and customised for registering domain names with automated verification of submission (according to the published rules), automated information gathering via the World Wide Web and automated notification via email.
A report has been produced, outlining the entire software development and a summary to be used in marketing brochures.
The future
The SRT prototype is currently a complete stand-alone application. Ideally, SRT will be divided into three levels, namely, user interface, intelligent agent logic and database. SRT can be extended in three ways. It should display its graphical user interface through World Wide Web browser. The intelligent agent logic should be extended to a web server. An SQL server should be used for its database.
Other processes required for commercialisation: