The main challenge was to understand the business problem. I was under the perception that the application accounts and server accounts are independent and there are no relation between them. It tuned that if this was taken as an assumption then admin would have to go through a lot of trouble to assign permission to the users. He would have to choose each and every user explicitly to provide them with acess to that account. Otherwise, users can be made into many small groups (user can be in more than one group) and assign groups to access that account. But this was rather clumsy approach. After two days of thinking with help of vinay we found a way of linking the server accounts, console accounts(accounts which will give access to actual application) and the application instance. Each application can have many instances such as development instance, testing instance, etc. so we considered application instance primary entity which is formed of the application name and the instance name. these instances have related accounts to them For example, suppose a siteminder application has a been installed on server1, it will be installed by a certain user. since serveral people must have access to this server account user will usually create a server account on the application name along with the application stage like If i am installing site minder for developers on server 2008 I will create an windows account siteminder_dev(username) and *** password. This password should be shared among all developer users. This account details are called ServerAccountsForApplication. To login the actual application installed on the server. Since it is a secured application I need to have a password and all developers have a user name and password (shared) same scenario as above. These application login details are called ConsoleAccountsForApplication. These both tables mentioned in bold are tied to aplication instance. This relation enabled me to give role based access to the user.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Database design
Ahh my favorite at last!!! I was the sole incharge for the database for all the class projects I have done till date. So I feel very comfortable doing this. This project being a realtime scenario I was required to have more features with regards to security.
Requirements gathering
The tasks was to gather all the functional requirements. Which was discussed verbally. Since this is a single man show I decided not waste too much time by writing the requirements in a detailed document. I'd rahter use a list fucntional requirments to save time. I have it jotted down in paper which I will be transcribing soon post it here.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Work breakdown structure
Today I was exposed to a new (actually old) way of planning for a project. Vinay taught me how to use Micrsoft project for making a work break structure. In my own words, wbs is a document in which we list all the tasks during the project life cycle and we use this task list to determine the time required, allocation of resources, precedence of tasks, determination of the shortest path to complete the project. Its helps to breakdown the project into smaller steps, to identify the critical path, to enable us to see the project from a prespective of a project manager.
Microsoft Project 2003 was used to create the wbs. Its an amazing tool. One of the key features is the way it shows the graph in a calender as we type in the tasks and as we assign the number of hours required for each tasks it updates the graph instantanesouly. Well this graph consists of the nodes which are tasks and the background is calender and the length of the tasks represent the time they take in calender. we can also assign the precedence of tasks. which will give the graph a structure. other wise all the tasks are shown in one single time block i.e the project assumes there are unlimited resources avilable to achieve the target and that one task is not dependent on the other. All this aside, to talk in more mathematical terms. Microsoft project will enable us to schedule all the tasks properly and to assign the resources at the critical points which will decrease the congestions and shorten critical path. It helps us to solve one big operation research problem. To increase efficiency. Psycologically speaking having listed down all tasks we can easily keep our goals short and focused. As we see task by task striken off our confidence builds up. Here is my current wbs
Project Start: Project Finish: | Mon 7/27/09 Thu 9/3/09 |
Tasks
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Resources
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Assignments
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Microsoft Home Page
Microsoft Project Home Page
The Business Problem
Few Days ago when I was chatting with my brother on how I wanted to work on a real time project on my own. He told me about a small business problem they were facing in their company and he asked if I could write an application which could solve it.
The Problem is that their company has many applications which are hosted in a number of servers. These account credentials are shared among many users i.e. different users login to the system(application/ server) using a shared user accounts. These accounts expire periodically and they have to be updated. When the update happens it becomes a painful process to send out an email to every one regarding the change.
This was a fairly simple business problem. It can be easily solved by using a central repository of accounts and each user is either given access can or cannot be given access.
But when the project details were sketched out it did not seem as simple s it looks.
Keep reading for more details about the project
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