Techworld: Home grown eMed app gets Web 2.0 refresh
March 16 2010
A story that will surprise from down under...
The University of NSW Faculty of Medicine has developed an in-house student management system, dubbed eMed, which has remained cost competitive with commercial software for seven years and is now being extended into the Web 2.0 paradigm.And what is the great mysterious flexible integrated and open application written on?
As the core internal undergraduate application for some 1500 students across six years, eMed has iterated through several major releases.
IT manager Luc Betbeder said there was nothing that "spoke our language" available in the market in 2003 to 2004 that supported the undergraduate capabilities the way the faculty needed and "those systems are just gaining credibility".
"It has handled re-skinning, Web 2.0 style refreshing, user-consumable content and just iterated along as the platform gave a lot of flexibility," he said. "The apps has a lot of Java views and great use of Javascript."
With the application designed to be service-oriented from the start, the faculty has been able to extend its functionality by integrating it with other internal and public systems.
eMed ties into the university's authentication system for single sign-on, and the general practitioner placement app is tied to Google Earth, so students can choose placement based on selection criteria and location.
The application is developed with Lotus Domino and consists of individual databases with specific requirements all "loosely tied together".Success stories like these are extremely powerful. Almost every Notes customer has one. The more you share -- through ibm.com case studies, IBM references, business partner success stories, and/or the press -- the more the market awareness of Notes/Domino's incredible application engine is raised. We all almost take it for granted, since this has always been a core strength of Notes/Domino. But an article like this serves as a powerful reminder of ways to amplify the message, starting with a solution and then describing how to get there rather than other way around.
Betbeder says the Notes development environment has been good for mixing open source and commercial products, which add to the flexibility of the application. ...
The Eclipse development environment is used and objects can be plugged into it and the faculty also built its own Dojo-like JavaScript frameworks.
With the equivalent of one full-time developer working on it, Betbeder says the cost to maintain it is minimal and: "Part of our toolbox of skills is Lotus development skills and Notes admin skills."
Link: Techworld: Home grown eMed app gets Web 2.0 refresh > (thanks, Marty)
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Luc Betbeder http://www.med.unsw.edu.au | 3/17/2010 1:23:59 AM
Michael.. eMed is used as a student system customised to our terminology and concepts. It provides students with their timetables and curriculum information as well as tools to submit and mark assignments. Other components are used to place our students into placements. While it is a pretty cool collection of applications it was build to manage a population of undergraduate medical students and not a nation-wide placement program.
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Luc Betbeder http://www.med.unsw.edu.au | 3/17/2010 1:26:05 AM
Thank Ed for picking up on this story...
During the interview with the journalist I tried to make a couple of points about Notes/Domino that I can perhaps expand on here since we are all friends.
Firstly, domino has been an incredibly flexible platform for us to develop on while we continued to develop the new medicine curriculum .. we developed this over 7 years .. laying down new features just ahead of the students each year. The degree is 6 Years. So last November the students that started with eMed in year one graduated.
At the same time we were adding features based on the business and user requirements the web itself changed and grew up also. And so we included all the new web goodness into the system as we went. Constant iterative releases; making our own tools ,learning from the community and leveraging from improvements made to Domino itself over those years. eMed grew up and matured through versions 6 to 8.5.
There were never any big releases to make it Web2.0 (whatever that is) we just released things as they were obviously possible and needed. Stop the whole page refreshing... cool lets do that.. Add Google maps.. yup easy. Because we were constantly releasing features this was both easy to include and we never made a big deal of it. Our approach to have the databases relatively independent of each other helped.. but the product made this approach and kind of development possible.
The other main point, is that while Domino is a nice flexible development environment it is also a very stable and powerful application server platform. Clustered. Stable. Backwards-Compatible. Secure. And easy to upgrade... Working with Domino from a server perspective is often funny.. “why is that field in this tab”.. but it is wonderfully stable and has the full benefits of a licensed product.
I’ve put the slides from my talk up on slideshare.net – these include my speaker’s notes... { Link }
There are also 3 flash demos of the system in action here: { Link }
Let me know if you want to know more about eMed via luc_betbeder on twitter
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David (The Notes Guy in Seattle) | 3/17/2010 4:55:11 PM
95% of people are imitators while only 5% are innovators.
When it comes to competitive advantage, as a rule innovators dominate imitators.
Companies that use Lotus Notes tend to be innovators.
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Tim Royle http://www.isw.net.au | 3/17/2010 8:17:03 PM
Good stuff Luc. Great to see that eMed is being enhanced and further developed. Takes me back to Lotusphere 2005 when Jim Leeper and I presented the eMed Case Study in The Mockingbird Room.
My two takeouts:
1) This is a great example of Domino delivering a high value application with a highly proffessional approach from inception, requirements analysis, development through to continuous improvement.
2) This application highlights the power of Notes/Domino to deliver collaborative, workflow based solutions and the continued development shows how UNSW are benefiting from 8.5 and the eclipse platform.
With the Australian Gov't announcement of $600 million for new training places for doctors over the next few years, it would be a tremendous opportunity for eMed to be used in any new medical schools here. Better to re-use a known product than to try developing anything new. And it would spread the Notes/Domino name further.