CASE Search
WHO?
CASE Search was developed for the University of Dundee’s College of Art, Science & Engineering to offer a bespoke solution for managing a vast catalogue of media resources.
THE BRIEF
The College of Art, Science & Engineering were sitting on an increasing number of photos of staff, events, campus architecture and more without any means of managing it. Hoping that staff would easily be able to retrieve images for use in marketing communications, CASE needed a way to:
- Quickly search and retrieve photos matching a range of criteria
- Restrict access to certain groups of staff
- Easily add large numbers of images to the system
Although a number of photo management solutions exist, such as Flickr, it was crucial that CASE be able to finely control access to the images, and there were rights issues involved with publishing to an external service which could easily be solved by maintaining an internal service.
WHAT I DID
Working in a tight team of four, we developed two products for CASE: a Windows-based administration tool for quick bulk editing of users and content, and a web-based interface for users and administrators alike, to access a Microsoft SQL Server database.
The application and web service both used a shared C# code-behind, with the accessible interface built on the ASP.NET framework. Because of the bespoke nature of the product, we were able to avoid any feature bloat, always emphasising the content in a pared-down minimalist design. The entire project was spread over ten weeks, however we developed the entire web interface and backend in just two weeks.