The final stretch

The home stretch

Exciting news. We are now moving into the final phase of development. All core modules have now been reviewed, modified, re-written or improved.

The last of these modules is LoginScript. This tool is used to customize the desktop appearance and set user customisation. It also handles the shortcut deployment where needed. Next to Manager, this has the biggest code set in the EISNet modules. Over the past week we have gone through it's 8,000 lines of code and removed code no longer needed and where possible, streamlined and improved the code. I'm happy to report the code is now at a little under 1,100 lines of code since the cleanup. That's a massive improvement.

As you know, we have moved away from a modular approach for EISNet and instead are now using a single tool. As a result we felt the term 'Manager' was no longer appropriate as it did not incorporate the Supervisor, Archivist and Package Manager tools in the name.

Therefore, I'm please to announce the new name for what was 'Manager'.

In EISNet v1.7, you'll be using EISNet Management Studio.

So whats next for the development?

Whilst all the modules have been adapted into v1.7, now comes a largely tougher, but altogether more pleasing area of development. Final testing begins now with the focus being on usability and reliability. We now need to remove all the bugs we've introduced over the past year of development. In a couple of weeks we have dedicated testing day, similar to the day we did last year. The plan is to have 5 or 6 people all trying hard to break the code at the same time. All the bugs will be logged and fixed as required.

All feature and new coding must be completed by April. That is our deadline. After then, only major bug fixes are allowed. We then we move into manuals / documentation, training and packaging. In this time we will also be doing field testing in a few schools.

The planned release of Summer is still achieveable, although I have to admit, I would prefer automatic upgrades from v1.6 to 1.7 to be tested a little more before we do our first upgrade.

In the coming months I hope to do a review based on the past year with screenshots of progress along the way and insight into the development.

I have to be honest, when I took on this project, I did not expect it to take this long. I think I under estimated the size of the product, or - if i'm honest, the complete mess the code was in. Still, from v1.7, EISNet has a solid foundation which has the scope for much more improvement over the next few years.