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The identification of the project took place in January 2001 and we determined that its aim would be to provide a secure means of displaying students' mid-term exam, assignment, final exam and overall results on a Web page, which would be used as an add-on to the current Portobello Web site. We met on a couple of occasions to discuss the project, the methodology, the design, the display and the level of research we would use during the process. These meetings were on an informal basis and individual handwritten notes were taken. We decided to begin with the creation of the two most relevant aspects of the project, the Web page and the database. These were reasonably straightforward and caused few problems. We then set about researching how to link the database to the page. This involved linking the database to the server, setting our Web page as our default Home page and activating the connection between the page and the database server. This caused us a lot of problems and took up some considerable time in research. The research itself took the form of checking out publications in bookshops and libraries, sourcing relevant Web sites until we had the basis of the code we required. Unfortunately, we had further difficulties with the code syntax, which lead us to seek advice and guidance from an acquaintance, Philip Mulligan, who works as a SAP Competence Centre Manager with ESB. Philip provided valuable advice and guidance and eventually, we produced the necessary code. However, this whole process had taken up a large amount of our time to the detriment of other areas. Finally, we were in a position to implement the Web pages properly. In hindsight, we didn't fully accomplish our aim in that we left ourselves little time to concentrate on providing a 'secure' site and we had to rush through our password procedure, which is inadequate. We realize that we focused too much attention on ensuring that the project worked and, as a result, didn't pay enough attention to the overall construction of the project. However, we are satisfied with the effort we put in and with the end result.
