Task 2.3

Did have a team in the first week but my team member joined another class. So am group less at the moment. I am coping well though on my own and will liaise with Dave frequently to make sure that I am on the right track all the time. I am in my final semester at present and am doing my last semester of the Industry Project which I can elaborate on in terms of my group and factors that make a team successful in their terms of the group members. I think the main factor in having a successful group is communication. If everyone is at the same level of communication then tasks that have been allocated to you as an individual will be seamlessly easy. Time management is another huge factor surrounding the performance of the group as a whole as they are always deadlines to meet. Reliability and punctuality are other critical factors that impact on the performance of the group. With regards to communication an online collaboration system would be the best way of communicating with team members. With regards to my IE group we use google apps. Its a fantastic web application that has has built in email, word processing, calendaring, chat. It has all the functionality to that a group could ever ask for. Online Collaboration is the way.

Task2.1

Was a bit rusty on normilisation, Last time I did it was in first year for FIT1004. Just had to brush up on some normilisation skills and went ok I guess. The grocery database was indeed a mess. Lots of redundancy and inconsistent data. Was all in all a good experience in doing normilisation again. It is indeed a critical point in design for a database. Used odbc to connect to the db and to pull data over. Was easy... Also used tools in access to visually see the relationships between the entities which helped in finding out foreign keys and primary keys. I think the hardest part for me was going through the data and removing the inconsistencies but again it wasnt difficult just time consuming. Definitely a realistic experience for me as this is what you do in industry but on a larger scale. Was really an intuitive learning experience.

Task1.3

In the older days of technology people loved what they did in respect to information technology. Although thinks seems difficult to us nowadays in those days no matter how long or tedious tasks were they were all comfortable with it because it worked for them. As technology moved on they were afraid to move over from manually doing stuff to the digital age.

The reason for this is they felt it would just not work for them, the old school way always works. Once they realize and overcome that barrier between computer based application and how easy life is and tech old school manual way they become fascinated and surprised to what technology can actually do for you and your business.

P

Task1.2

OpenIt
6 Lauradan Avenue
20 July 2008

To : Anne and Elizabeth

From : P M

Subject : Proposal for online store

With regards to the future plans for Haircare studios I am pleased to advise you that the idea of moving to the web is a total must. With a business as such being online we have the potential to reach customers worldwide. Being web based also advertisers the product much more then traditional methods of advertising. Being online will require a provider to host the website and a digital certificate from a third party such as Geotrust to verify client and server activity and that people are who they claim to be so its totally secure. Payments will be transferred directly into your account which makes trading over the web really intuitive and easy. Depending on the clientele we will be able to decipher our bandwidth needs and costs. Look forward to seeing you soon.

Copy to: Pranesh Medilall
Yousef Aljaberi

Task1.1

It was indeed a learning curve for me as I have never used ODBC before. After using it in the first tutorial, I now realise how powerful this tool actually is. It really makes life easy when you require to import data from one DB to another. Was very interesting doing the first exercise. I actually ran into no problems. Followed POD`s notes and all was good. SQL, ODBC, Excel, Access - In access and excel we can store information and run SQL queries against to retrieve data. IN instances where by we need to import data from one data store to another we can used ODBC to allow us to import data and the structure of the DB into a current DB. Theres no need to recreate structure neither do we have to manually copy entries accross. All in all it was a learning experience in the lab this week.