Background

LearnQuick provides a range of professional online courses. A recently developed content creation tool and expansion into new marakets meant that LearnQuick required a standard and flexible tool to offer third parties.

Challenges and Opportunities

LearnQuick wanted develop a portable system that could used to provide online courses. Courses could be provided by LearnQuick or other vendors and hosted almost anywhere.

Options

Options for development came down to three main options:

1. VBScript ASP - a commonly implemented language available on any server with Windows NT4+ installed;
2. J2EE - A complete java solution would provide greater portabiity;
3. .NET - .NET C# is approximately 30% faster than ASP.

.NET at the time of this development was not widley implemented. While J2EE would provide a system that can be ported to several different platforms, LearnQuick was already familiar with Windows and IIS.

The Solution

A complete ASP VBScript component architecture build on the following core components:

1. Customer relationship - services to discover, store and maintain use customer profiles;
2. Product catalogue - services to store, retrieve and maintain course, program and module information; and
3. Skin - services that provide faciltities to modify existing designs or create new ones.