Member Services Portal
 Abstract
Member Services Portal (MS Portal) is a web portal in DotNetNuke 3.1.1. Our client’s employees use this portal for their daily work related activities. By the use of this portal, they can maintain high efficiency and level of communication between various employees of various departments.
MS Portal contains various DotNetNuke modules providing different functionalities such as creating and modifying user accounts, managing important documents and providing access level security to these documents, content based search, training and troubleshooting information etc.
Introduction
Our client is the fastest growing VOIP telephone services provider to consumers over the Internet. To support business, they have developed several business and operation support systems. To maintain efficiency as well as ease of communication with employees, client needed an intranet portal for administrative purposes.
The intranet portal in question is the Member Services Portal. This portal allows the client to perform important functions and maintain a central repository of data.
However, for a company of the size and magnitude of our client, a large number of tasks are needed to be performed. It is a very complex task to build a web application which will incorporate all these different functions and also allow adding of new functionality later.
Challenge
As a rapidly growing company, it has to increase efficiency in the workplace to maintain high standards. The same criteria is applicable to the intranet portal in the company, it should provide a wide range of functionalities and be flexible enough to include additional functionalities over a period of time.
It is a very complex task to build a web application which will incorporate different functions and also allow adding of new functionality later. Also, it is not feasible to develop different web applications that will cater to specific functionalities as that will most certainly mean a decentralized pattern of functioning.
Solution
Considering the limitations of conventional web applications, it was imperative that the choice of the application depended on a “plug-in” sort of feature in it, which would allow different functionalities to be “plugged-in” without disturbing the application itself.
This “plug-in” feature is a characteristic of the DotNetNuke framework. Also, DotNetNuke fitted the bill perfectly with its use of modules which will provide different functionality.
Facilities in Member Services Portal
 Users Manager
DotNetNuke has an inbuilt functionality to create and modify user accounts; however this functionality can be used only by users having DotNetNuke administrator rights. So, a need was felt to provide users with other security roles to create and modify user accounts.
The Users Manager allows the creation of new users as well as assigning different security roles to them. Proper validations have been provided to ensure that detailed information about each and every employee has been submitted. Apart from creating users, this also provides functionality to search for users, and sorting of users can also be done.
Search documents
DotNetNuke has an inbuilt search mechanism which provides search results for the portal. The Search module within DotNetNuke was customized to perform content based search of documents within the Document Exchange (DMX) module. Each document within the DMX module has versions so that the latest version can be accessed.
The users with administrator rights are shown all the versions of the documents while normal users are shown the latest version of that document.
Document Exchange
The Document Exchange (DMX) is a third-party option which performs the function of managing various documents. It allows users to edit the documents and maintain a latest version which is why it has been coupled with the Search module. It provides search according to document title.
List Articles
The List Articles is a customized DotNetNuke Links module which displays links to the documents which have been added recently to the DMX module.
Links
The Links module provides links to various documents. The Links modules have been carefully segregated so that they contain documents which provide information on a specific topic. The various topics which are covered by Links modules are Account Maintenance, Billing, Cancellation, Installation, Customer Service, Payments, Sales, Troubleshooting and Training.
Conclusion
Member Services Portal is a web application developed in DotNetNuke 3.1.1. The portal meets all the requirements specified and is quite robust as well as flexible.
MS Portal contains various DotNetNuke modules providing different functionalities such as creating and modifying user accounts, managing important documents and providing access level security to these documents, content based search, training and troubleshooting information etc.
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