Mobile Timeline of corporate life for the iPhone. We invite you to speak!
Hello!
Today we want to invite a respected community to evaluate the idea of an iPhone application that aggregates messages from corporate social networks. Under the post we offer to leave comments of various orientations, exposing errors and praising the merits of the application interface, its design or the idea itself, and the technical characteristics of the application. In general, let's frolic! (but constructively!)
What is important: this is not just another social network aggregator, the key word here is “corporate”!
')
We have something happening every day at EastBanc Technologies: projects start and end, vacancies appear, new partnerships appear, important dates are celebrated, journalists come to us, or we write another masterpiece on Habré ... Thanks to this abundance of informational reasons, every day several news and other various messages.
We strive to place in the Internet a maximum of relevant information, so that potential customers can make an impression about us before they start working with us; so that applicants can appreciate the atmosphere, office, traditions, prospects, technologies with which they will work; so that colleagues from the Washington office know what is happening with comrades in Russia; so that the employees of the Novosibirsk office know how their company is positioning itself "in the world."
Actually, this is why we have active accounts in all leading social networks and news on the corporate website is systematically updated. And this is not a tribute to fashion, but a tough necessity dictated by PR goals.
For example, our Washington colleagues almost do not go to VKontakte, but they are actively using Facebook, and we are happy to put all our Russian newsletters there big and small, in order to at least slightly overcome the territorial gap and create a single information field for both EastBanc offices. On the corporate website and on Twitter, we publish all sorts of business news related to projects, because Our clients prefer to read our microblogging (this saves time). Well, and so on. Social networks are different, social networks are important and they all bring profit to the company.
But such activity turned out to be a significant disadvantage: their own, relatives, and employees of the Novosibirsk office began to miss the news, which resulted in such real and perceived problems as: 1. People were upset that they had missed and learned later. 2. People in the future could miss information about how the company is positioning itself in the outside world on a particular issue, and prevent mistakes when communicating with customers or applicants.
It is clear that a rare person actively uses immediately and Vkontakte, and Facebook, and Twitter, or even just has accounts everywhere. So that employees could follow all company news using smartphones in real time, without interrupting production and not opening up extra pages, we came up with Timeline corporate news aggregator.
Mobile Timeline is an iPhone application that aggregates records from corporate accounts on social networks, as well as news from the corporate website, displays them as a timeline and sends push notifications to users when updates appear. It looks like this:
This is the whole point of our idea, but the functionality is not exhausted. Let's stop running ahead of the engine and start from the beginning, that is, from the main menu:
In the main menu, we find quick access to both the page with the aggregated content and the buttons to access each news source separately. Pay attention to the sections that the article has not yet mentioned - “Birthdays” and “List of employees”. Information for these sections goes to the application from our intra-corporate SharePoint portal and is available only to registered users (no need to register separately, you get to the sections using your corporate login password). We will describe further the technical implementation of these sections and push notifications for them.
Here is the source page:
Corporate website
Twitter
Facebook
In contact with
List of employees
Birthdays
Something like this, we are going to keep up with the whole team on the latest developments of the company.
At the back-end, we most often use the following technology stack: Spring Framework, Hibernate, Apache Tomcat. But on this project we worked with a large number of different sources, so for the storage of information we decided to use the NoSQL database - mongoDB, which provides the ability to work with information consisting of heterogeneous, weakly structured documents. Unlike SQL databases, mongoDB uses such a thing as a collection. To store information from social networks and news portals, we began to use one collection. This allowed us to provide information to the client application in the form of a timeline.
Spring Social was used to obtain information from several social networks; own libraries were made to obtain information from other sources. We tried to use Spring Social Vkontakte, but this module does not yet allow getting information from VKontakte without user authorization. And we wanted to develop a convenient application that gives the easiest and fastest access to information, so we made the news from the social network VKontakte using RestTemplate from the Spring Web framework. We also wrote a service for getting information from our corporate site on Liferay 6.
The server-side architecture is designed in such a way that the service that provides information to the client is practically unrelated to those services that receive information from external sources. And in order to add support for a new source, in the server part it is only necessary to describe a new type of event and add a service that receives information.
In order to ensure regular replenishment of the repository, our services are scheduled to go to social networking services, retrieve information and put it into a database.
The main task of the server is to provide the collected information in the form of an ordered stream of information (timeline) to the mobile client, and the development of mobile applications always imposes a limit on the amount of data transmitted due to the transmission method and the quality of communication. Therefore, the server gives the information to the client in small parts. But the usual system of page-by-page output of records does not fit: while the client receives the requested information from the server, a new portion of the data may already arrive in the server database. We conducted a study of this problem and selected a Twitter model.
Another task was to send push notifications to new devices from external sources to client devices. Working with push notifications (on the server side) for Apple devices consists of several steps (described in detail on the Apple website for developers):
In our projects for working with push-notifications, we use JavaPNS. This is a mature product that allows you to send both regular notifications and notifications for the Kiosk (Newsstand). Able to interact with the APNS Feedback Service and provides an adequate service for dealing with errors when sending notifications. Thanks to these advantages, we used it for Corporate News Timeline.
As you can see, the application is almost ready. Soon it will be published in the AppStore and is available for download. Working on the idea of this application, we first of all thought about ourselves - how the application will embellish the life of the EastBanc Technologies employees, what will be useful for each of us ... And then, as the publication approached, we began to think about how viable the idea of a mobile corporate news aggregator could be There are options for using the application, which still needs to be screwed to it, and decided that in the near future:
For example, what can be useful for companies that use social networks to support end-users and promote their products and services.
Plans, of course, Napoleon, but we like :) And how do you like this idea?
PS: You can also speak on the product page on Facebook .
UPD 05/04/2013 Removed from the hub “Mobile development”
Today we want to invite a respected community to evaluate the idea of an iPhone application that aggregates messages from corporate social networks. Under the post we offer to leave comments of various orientations, exposing errors and praising the merits of the application interface, its design or the idea itself, and the technical characteristics of the application. In general, let's frolic! (but constructively!)
What is important: this is not just another social network aggregator, the key word here is “corporate”!
')
How was the idea born
We have something happening every day at EastBanc Technologies: projects start and end, vacancies appear, new partnerships appear, important dates are celebrated, journalists come to us, or we write another masterpiece on Habré ... Thanks to this abundance of informational reasons, every day several news and other various messages.
We strive to place in the Internet a maximum of relevant information, so that potential customers can make an impression about us before they start working with us; so that applicants can appreciate the atmosphere, office, traditions, prospects, technologies with which they will work; so that colleagues from the Washington office know what is happening with comrades in Russia; so that the employees of the Novosibirsk office know how their company is positioning itself "in the world."
Actually, this is why we have active accounts in all leading social networks and news on the corporate website is systematically updated. And this is not a tribute to fashion, but a tough necessity dictated by PR goals.
For example, our Washington colleagues almost do not go to VKontakte, but they are actively using Facebook, and we are happy to put all our Russian newsletters there big and small, in order to at least slightly overcome the territorial gap and create a single information field for both EastBanc offices. On the corporate website and on Twitter, we publish all sorts of business news related to projects, because Our clients prefer to read our microblogging (this saves time). Well, and so on. Social networks are different, social networks are important and they all bring profit to the company.
But such activity turned out to be a significant disadvantage: their own, relatives, and employees of the Novosibirsk office began to miss the news, which resulted in such real and perceived problems as: 1. People were upset that they had missed and learned later. 2. People in the future could miss information about how the company is positioning itself in the outside world on a particular issue, and prevent mistakes when communicating with customers or applicants.
It is clear that a rare person actively uses immediately and Vkontakte, and Facebook, and Twitter, or even just has accounts everywhere. So that employees could follow all company news using smartphones in real time, without interrupting production and not opening up extra pages, we came up with Timeline corporate news aggregator.
What is Mobile Timeline Corporate Life?
Mobile Timeline is an iPhone application that aggregates records from corporate accounts on social networks, as well as news from the corporate website, displays them as a timeline and sends push notifications to users when updates appear. It looks like this:
This is the whole point of our idea, but the functionality is not exhausted. Let's stop running ahead of the engine and start from the beginning, that is, from the main menu:
In the main menu, we find quick access to both the page with the aggregated content and the buttons to access each news source separately. Pay attention to the sections that the article has not yet mentioned - “Birthdays” and “List of employees”. Information for these sections goes to the application from our intra-corporate SharePoint portal and is available only to registered users (no need to register separately, you get to the sections using your corporate login password). We will describe further the technical implementation of these sections and push notifications for them.
Here is the source page:
Corporate website
In contact with
List of employees
Birthdays
Something like this, we are going to keep up with the whole team on the latest developments of the company.
How it works
At the back-end, we most often use the following technology stack: Spring Framework, Hibernate, Apache Tomcat. But on this project we worked with a large number of different sources, so for the storage of information we decided to use the NoSQL database - mongoDB, which provides the ability to work with information consisting of heterogeneous, weakly structured documents. Unlike SQL databases, mongoDB uses such a thing as a collection. To store information from social networks and news portals, we began to use one collection. This allowed us to provide information to the client application in the form of a timeline.
Spring Social was used to obtain information from several social networks; own libraries were made to obtain information from other sources. We tried to use Spring Social Vkontakte, but this module does not yet allow getting information from VKontakte without user authorization. And we wanted to develop a convenient application that gives the easiest and fastest access to information, so we made the news from the social network VKontakte using RestTemplate from the Spring Web framework. We also wrote a service for getting information from our corporate site on Liferay 6.
The server-side architecture is designed in such a way that the service that provides information to the client is practically unrelated to those services that receive information from external sources. And in order to add support for a new source, in the server part it is only necessary to describe a new type of event and add a service that receives information.
In order to ensure regular replenishment of the repository, our services are scheduled to go to social networking services, retrieve information and put it into a database.
The main task of the server is to provide the collected information in the form of an ordered stream of information (timeline) to the mobile client, and the development of mobile applications always imposes a limit on the amount of data transmitted due to the transmission method and the quality of communication. Therefore, the server gives the information to the client in small parts. But the usual system of page-by-page output of records does not fit: while the client receives the requested information from the server, a new portion of the data may already arrive in the server database. We conducted a study of this problem and selected a Twitter model.
Another task was to send push notifications to new devices from external sources to client devices. Working with push notifications (on the server side) for Apple devices consists of several steps (described in detail on the Apple website for developers):
- get token from client
- send message in JSON format to Apple servers (APNS)
- regularly poll the APNS servers for a list of devices that no longer want to receive notifications.
In our projects for working with push-notifications, we use JavaPNS. This is a mature product that allows you to send both regular notifications and notifications for the Kiosk (Newsstand). Able to interact with the APNS Feedback Service and provides an adequate service for dealing with errors when sending notifications. Thanks to these advantages, we used it for Corporate News Timeline.
Why feedback is important to us
As you can see, the application is almost ready. Soon it will be published in the AppStore and is available for download. Working on the idea of this application, we first of all thought about ourselves - how the application will embellish the life of the EastBanc Technologies employees, what will be useful for each of us ... And then, as the publication approached, we began to think about how viable the idea of a mobile corporate news aggregator could be There are options for using the application, which still needs to be screwed to it, and decided that in the near future:
- We make it possible to comment on the news directly from the aggregator.
- Let us add the opportunity to share the news in our personal accounts.
- Let's make it possible to go to the browser page of the link on the link.
- Let's make the application available for devices on other platforms.
- Let's think about how to use the application not from the point of view of internal corporate communications, but from the point of view of business.
For example, what can be useful for companies that use social networks to support end-users and promote their products and services.
Plans, of course, Napoleon, but we like :) And how do you like this idea?
PS: You can also speak on the product page on Facebook .
UPD 05/04/2013 Removed from the hub “Mobile development”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/175437/
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