The brief
Two projects sitting under the same umbrella. E.ON Talking Energy is an extension of the E.ON YouTube Channel, and it is designed to facilitate a dialog between E.ON and the public. E.ON Great Saves uses competitions to leverage E.ON's sponsorship of the FA Cup.
The solution
Both sites were built as a single eZpublish application, running in a load balanced setup. The front end uses JQuery and Flash elements, and WebServices / Soap are used for communicating with third parties and some interface elements.
The deliverables
This is a complex project with a broad range of elements brought under one roof. Among the elements included: user account management, moderated discussion board, interaction with YouTube API, content management, calendar management from a web interface, interaction with third parties via web services for prize fulfilment and availabitlity, image and video galleries.
The team
Grand Union is quite unique in having a large user experience department - larger than the backend development one in fact! Typically the team consisted of 4 information architects, 2 PHP developers, 1 HTML and 1 DHTML developer, 1 Actionscripter, 1 creative, 2 project managers, 1 QA manager.
My involvment
I wrote technical specifications and use cases, liaised with the client facing team and the client, lead and QA'ed the technical team. In the last few days of the projects, After handing over to the new technical director, I did some Actionsript amends to the project.
The outcome
eZpublish is a challenging platform to develop for, but both sites were launched successfully.
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