Eximios / Cases / Exam Solution

Exam Solution

This case is about an exam solution project developed by EXIMIOS in partnership with Seeds Consulting.

Client
  • Name: The City of Oslo Education Agency (UDE)
  • Industry: Education
  • Country: Norway
Goals
  • Conduct examinations directly on student computers
  • Control and restrict students' access to computers during exams period
  • Control and restrict the student usage of their computers during exams period
  • Integrate the existing educational system in order to allow the teachers to control the students computers
Scope
  • Hundreds of schools to be involved
  • 14 Active directories
  • Over 120.000 student computers
  • Build server applications to integrate the student machines with the existing educational system that stored information about students, computers, teachers, schools, locations, etc
  • Create a messaging system in order to process commands between machines
  • Encryption of messages for high level security
  • Solving messaging concurrence issues
  • Use a firewall system to block and control the usage of the internet
  • Monitor the machines and students activities
  • Effective management to deliver the project on time and assure it within the budget
Technologies
  • .NET (Visual Studio)
  • C++
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • WFP (Windows Filtering Platform)
  • WCF (Windows Communication Foundation)
  • WIPFW (Windows operation system for firewall IPFW)
  • RSA and AES (Encryption techniques)
Challenges
  • Complexity of the architecture
  • High scalability due to the huge amount of computers and the variation of computers in use
  • Usage of the newly released WFP technology for Windows 7
  • High performance solution handling thousand of messages during exam period
  • Security to guarantee the exam credibility
  • Create a steady communication in between machines managing peak request rates
  • Restore the huge amount of data information when server connection break down
  • The original project documentation was entirely in Norwegian
Solutions
  • Involvement of the senior architects since the early planning phase
  • High efficiency of the technical architecture solution
  • Allocation of challenge driven programmers in the project
  • Fast learning of needed technologies as the newly released WFP for Windows 7
  • Stress test using 1 Million computers simulation
  • Native Norwegian speaker in the project, and also automatic translation of Norwegian documents
Resources
  • 2 programmers / months
  • 6 months
  • Board of architects
  • Infrastructure
Key Success Factors
  • Successful conceivement of an effective architecture solving the scalability, performance and message concurrence issues
  • Communication followed by prompt delivery and response
Contact Us