Yay, new meeting

We have met to discuss the prototypes of the Graphical User Interface(GUI) for our project. In the process each member of a group has came up with a prototype, and explained the details.

Here is an album with mock ups:
Album

Today we owned meeting

During the team meeting we have composed the set of requirements for the project. This is the highlights of the meeting:

Important characteristics of the user-base

1. The city has a large number of very long-term employees(10+ years) who have limited computer skills and it is not the city’s policy to upgrade their computer literacy skills if it is not essential to their job.
2. Another large portion of the city’s employees, (e.g. water mains repairmen) need to reference documents(e.g. water line plans) while in the field. Their current work-flow requires them to print out any documents they require beforehand and they require a document management system that can be securely accessed while in the field.
3. The rest of the user base works in offices and is relatively computer literate, but nevertheless has trouble quickly locating necessary documents due to the complexity of the current access system.

Important characteristics of the tasks performed by users

1. The vast majority of use-cases  access only a few documents at a time, often just one, therefore a robust batch-processing system is not required in the first version.
2. By policy, documents are never destroyed and instead different revisions are all stored, therefore a robust revision control system is essential.

A description of important characteristics of the task environment

1. The City of Kamloops uses a Windows only environment throughout the organisation, therefore the system has to run on Internet Explorer on the city’s Intranet, therefore it is not necessary to check the system for compatibility with other browsers and operating systems.
2. The City of Kamloops favors software products that support embedding in Microsoft Office solutions such as Microsoft Outlook.

The group project overview

Our group has decided to develop a functional prototype of a system that will streamline the document flow of the employees City of Kamloops by providing an intuitive interface for creating, accessing and modifying the documents stored on the city’s internal database.

The City is deploying an enterprise-class documents and records management system. A challenge for rank and file knowledge workers involves classification of every document created according to a classification system of up to 800 categories. How can this be made easier than picking from a massive list or even a hierarchy. Is there a more intuitive way of representing 800 categories?