A collaborative discussion application will provide the following benefits:
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It will provide an excellent framework for achieving teamwork.
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It will capture all communications in a structured manner.
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It will reduce the cost of communication.
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It will provide convenience across time zones for participation in discussions.
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It will be possible to track all customer feedback in an organized manner.
The IT consulting firm has assigned this project a team, which consists of a project manager and two developers. Employees will use this application to contribute their ideas and discuss issues and problems within teams. In addition, the same application will be used for tracking the customer feedback.
The discussion application will contain mainly the following four types of documents:
The functionality offered by each of these documents is described in the following sections.
Main Topic Documents
Main topic documents contain the main topic of discussion. In addition to the main discussion body, these documents contain the name of the person who initiated the discussion and the location of the initiator, the subject of the discussion, and the topic category. The topic category is used to specify whether the discussion is general or related to customer feedback. Main topic documents are used whenever a new discussion is initiated or customer feedback is entered.
Response to Main Topic Documents
These documents are created as responses to the main topic documents that already exist. Users can create the response to main topic documents either from the main topic documents or from the response-to-response documents.
Response to main topic documents contain the name of the person who created the document, the subject for the response, and the content of the response. These documents automatically inherit the subject, topic category, classification, and location of the main topic documents.
Response-to-Response Documents
These documents are the response documents to the response to main topic documents. These documents contain the name of the person who created the response-to-response document, the subject of the document, and the content of discussion. The subject, topic category, classification, and location of the response to main topic document are inherited from the parent document.
User Interest Profile
User interest profile is a document that lists the various attributes that constitute the user interest. This document contains details such as discussion contributors, topic category, classification, location, and subject of discussion. There can be only one interest profile allowed for each user. The application will dispatch a notification to those users who have created an interest profile if a matching document is found.
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