We are proud that our company was awarded ‘Partner of the Year’ for Software Development this year at Microsoft WPC 2011, for work developed in conjunction with the Education and Scholarly Communication Area of Microsoft Research.
As part of that partnership, Softtek has been supporting the evolution of Zentity, a Microsoft-based repository platform that leverage the research activity carried out by universities and government agencies, through projects targeted to enable the adoption of the platform. I’ll describe our experience with one of these projects, in a nutshell….
Zentity Deployment in Jorge Tadeo Lozano University
The Jorge Tadeo Lozano University (UJTL) wanted to implement an institutional repository to store the output generated by their researchers and, hence started working with Microsoft Research to deploy Zentity 2.0 as the solution to support UJTL’s needs.
For that reason, and given our close collaboration with Microsoft, we got involved in this project to perform a deployment that could fulfill the expectations of UJTL, who had the following objectives for the initiative:
- Establish a repository of Marine Biology Thesis to foster the exchange of knowledge among researchers of UJTL and other Colombian universities
- Establish a repository of researchers data to enable cooperation projects among researchers from RUMBO Network
- Localize Zentity to Spanish so it could be deployed in more Latin American universities
- Create a reference deployment to boost the adoption of Zentity in Latin-American
During the first sprint of the project, the team focused on analyzing the project requirements and localizing the product to Spanish. Also during this phase the team identified the necessity to customize some of the out-of-the-box capabilities provided by Zentity 2.0, such as following:
- Custom Data Model targeted to UJTL’s needs
- Visual Tools customizations to navigate through UJTL’s repository
- WCF services to expose additional platform functionality
- PowerShell administration scripts for data population
- Generic Web UI on Silverlight 4
For the second sprint of the project, the team worked on building the customizations mentioned above, relying heavily on prototyping techniques that could gather quick feedback from the end-user. The team also managed to get a final version of the custom data model to support UJTL’s repository and implemented it using RDF schemas. This custom data model was critical for success since it exploited the semantic capabilities provided by Zentity at a fine-grained level and with meaningful relationships among the data.
In the third and last sprint of the project, the team was devoted to the deployment of the custom platform into UJTL’s environment. This phase required us to deal with the generation of custom tools to streamline the process of data population, the setup in all different environments (staging and production), the user acceptance test of the project and the corresponding training to end-users and administrators of the repository.
After delivering the project successfully, the reference deployment of Zentity was initially presented in the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2011 and later in the Open Repositories 2011 Conference. There, Softtek was invited to speak in the following presentation: Overcoming Industry Information Challenges with Open Repository Platforms: A case study with Zentity, and to provide a Zentity workshop along with Microsoft Research.
A final word …
Having partnered with Microsoft Research in the deployment of Zentity 2.0 has definitely been an enriching experience for us since, on one hand, we have demonstrated Softtek’s continuous commitment to deliver high-quality services while working jointly with a highly respected high-tech company like Microsoft. We have been exposed to emergent technologies that will shape our world in the next 5 or 10 years. Indeed this exposure will help us add a fresh perspective to the set of solutions that we already provide to our large base of customers.
Congratulations, Softtek!
Antonio Macias
