OUP Placement 2006

February was quite a busy month with the new Maths product GCSE Maths Assessment, this product was a total nightmare to begin with! The reason for it was that it uses the Tomcat Apache service to host a the web application that controls the whole product. On top of that it uses a firebird database server to provide the web application with the database backend. These two services need to run on either the server (for network) or the standalone machine if it is to just be installed to one machine. This program works very well if you can get past the original hurdles but those hurdles were getting bigger and bigger. This was mainly due to the fact that users had to run the script for the two services (which looks messy but this is normal) and then go into internet explorer to launch the webapplication. A lot of people struggled to understand the concept if they were not connected to the internet! This also posed problems with conflicts on the servers as another piece of Maths software uses the same Tomcat port number (as does some Firewall softwares). After careful consideration work will begin in March to create a second version!

There were also a few more bits and bobs with the Maths department, as we had two new pieces of software coming out but thankfully they were quite self explanatory. We also ironed out the final pieces of the Framework Maths issue

The rest of Feb was spent updating the technical support website and providing the Primary teams with support to their up-coming product Maths Investigator, again working closely with the developer to ensure that program would not cause any problems with users