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Redevelop School Equipment inventory

Project ID: 
269
Current stage: 
Manager: 
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What: 

Description: Design and implement a new School equipment inventory.

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Why: 

Customer:

Case statement: The current inventory system does not meet all our requirements and there is concern that tracking machines has now become unreliable. This is particularly the case for self-managed machines. We are not able to easily answer fundamental inventory questions - this is a particular problem for planning expenditure and machine allocation.

A previous project reviewed the existing system. It had been hoped that this project would identify some simple fixes to the existing system, but unfortunately the conclusion was that the base inventory schema was sufficiently flawed that many problems could simply not be fixed. Basically, the system was not designed to cater for self-managed machines.

It is widely accepted that a complete redesign is required. It may well be possible to re-use some components of the existing system.

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Status:

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Time:

How: 

Proposal:

Resources: 9 weeks effort in total.

Plan:

  1. Check what other schools are using to inventory equipment
  2. Design (2 weeks)
    1. Sketch architecture
    2. Design schema
    3. Decide on information flow between information sources/sinks
    4. Consider whether software inventory could be easily added as a later project
    5. Consult
    6. Determine how much of Theon can be used (querying/editing/reports)
    7. Sketch design of :
      1. inventory editing/querying tools (invedit/invquery)
      2. order editing (rfe orders)
      3. MAC loading
      4. LCFG conduits
      5. client machine conduit (clientreport)
      6. switchdb conduit (switchtoinfdb)
      7. Web reports
    8. Consider which existing data to migrate, and how.
    9. Consult
  3. Implement (4 weeks)
    1. Add schema to Theon and create tables
    2. Create test data and load into tables
    3. Implement inventory query tool
    4. Implement order editing code
    5. Implement MAC loading conduit
    6. Implement client machine conduit
    7. Implement switchdb conduit
    8. Implement LCFG conduits
    9. Implement inventory edit tool
    10. Implement web reports
    11. Test against test data
  4. Documentation and training (1 week)
  5. Migrate data (2 weeks)
Other: 

Home page:
home page on wiki

Dependencies:

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Milestones

Proposed date Achieved date Name Description