PREFACE

When we talk about the present century, computers have become an important part of the day-

to-day life of the common people. Several electronic devices have been invented but it can be

said that computer has made the greatest impact on mankind than any other electronic devices.

Computers are used in fields such as educational institutions, office administration, factory

automation, medicine and sports. They find great applications in the fields for fine arts, politics,

military, government, engineering, Science and research, designing buildings and machines etc.

At present Computers and their applications significantly affect almost every aspect of Modern

Institutions, Government Offices and in Business. Therefore, designing and developing effective

database manipulating systems in business and in other firms, is becoming increasingly

important. One of such areas requiring the development of a fully-featured system is to develop

an intranet based online help desk for educational institutions which is accessible throughout the

campus.

Here is the project report on the development of Online Help Desk web site. In the project

report you will come across the modules that are created in the project like

login,student,faculty,staff,complaints,information updates and report generations.The

report consists of the data flow diagram that depicts the functional model of our project

highlighting the functional relationship of the values computed by the system including input

values,output values and internal data stores.It also has an ER–diagram that very well explains

our project with a detailed description about various entities involved in our project and the

description of each phase involved in development cycle ,thereby making it easy to understand.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

With full devotion and sincerety to GOD for his kind blessings,This is to extend our gratitude to

everyone who provided us a strong support for the successful development of our MCA 4 th sem

project.

Firstly, my heartful thanks to my project guide MR. DEEPAK SINGH for his continuous

guidance and constant support which helped us the most in developing this project.

My sincere thanks to Mr. VIPIN DIWEDI for being our source of encouragement throughout

the development of the project.

Lastly, very special thanks to all our fellow beings for their valuable ideas and criticisms that

helped us a lot in enriching our project further.

ALL ARE GREATLY ACKNOWLEDGED.

ABSTRACT

The aim of this project is to develop an intranet based online help desk for educational institutions which is accessible throughout the campus to facilitate the various on-campus users in providing information and requesting for the various services and facilities offered by a particular institution including syllabus updates, results, attendance status, timetable updates, exam schedules etc..

The proposed system will enable the users to make requests for the services available, by using their login ID and PASSWORD provided by the administrator and these requests will be sent to the concerned people to resolve them on time.

The system will also include report generators to generate periodic reports and email notification feature to keep updating the users about the status of his/her request.

PROBLEM DEFINITION:

Presently, the college does not provide any Online Help Desk facility to students, faculty and other campus users to enquire about various college facilities or to register his/her complaints. Thus the current manual management system often imposes several difficulties as follows:-

Lack of a responsive system for the students to inquire about about various facilities provided in the college; events and other details.

Lack of an integrated system where all the required information, facilities, services offered is put at one place.

Current system lacks time management and requires lot of human effort.

Currently, the students face the problem of communication gap in regards to the information they require from the administrative cell. E.g. Information regarding a formal procedure to apply for the various issues-like scholarships, documents retrieval, any genre of authority approval.

OBJECTIVES AND GOALS OF THE PROPOSED SYSTEM:

The online help desk is to be designed specifically to address the problems mentioned regarding the current system. Keeping the problem of the current system in mind,

The proposed system is designed to build an intranet based integrated system to automate the current manual system with the functionalities to provide online help and support to various on-campus users thereby automating the manual system of logging the problems via a web based system.

The major goal of the proposed system is to process the queries of various naïve users and provide timely information thereby making it easy and feasible for the naïve users to get a solution to their problems.

The proposed system will enable the users to request for the various available services provided by the college.

The system will bridge the communication gap between students and administrative cell.

FEATURES OF ONLINE HELP DESK

An integrated system for easy access to the required information.

Quick and consistent response through email notifications.

Time saving by providing an online platform in place of current manual system.

Query processing.

Login facility for different kinds of users.

Maintaining up to date information.

Feedback facility

Query status check facility.

Report generation facility.

FUNCTIONAL COMPONENTS OF THE HELP DESK:

Following is a list of functionalities of the system. More functionality that we find appropriate can be added to this list.

There are registered people in the system (students, faculty, assignee and others).

There are four kinds of users for this system:

1. those who use the system to create a request (students) 2. those who look at the created requests and assign them to the concerned people (assignee)3. those who work on the assigned requests and update the status of the same on the system

(faculty and staff members).4. those who make necessary updates regarding various vital information.(faculty).

At the top, there is an ‘Administrator’ for doing the Admin-level functions such as creating user accounts, adding new facilities to the system, adding new details etc. Administrator has the privilege of updating, modifying and deleting any record from the database.

1. A person should be able to login to the system through the first page of the application. change the password after logging into the system. view the status of the complaints registered by him/her (the status could be one of

registered/assigned/ in progress/pending/completed/rejected). view the list of requests (both open and closed) created by him/her over the past. register a new complaint by specifying the complaint type, the severity of the

request (there may be several levels of severity defined) and a brief description of the request.

close a request created by him/her by giving an appropriate reason. see the requests that are assigned to him/her by the facility-heads and update the

status of requests (after working on them). view the incoming requests (if he/she is a facility-head) and assign them to

registered users of the system. get help about the OHD system on how to use the different features of the system.

2. As soon as a request is created, an automatic email should be sent to the person who created the request and the concerned facility-head. The mail should contain the request details.

3. Similarly, when any status-change occurs for a request (such as the request getting completed etc), an automatic email should be sent to the person who created the request and the concerned facility-head.

SYSTEM SPECIFICATION

Hardware requirements

Number Description Alternatives (If available)

1 PC with 2 GB hard-disk and 256 MB RAM

Not-Applicable

Software requirements

Number Description Tools used

1 Operating System Windows 95/98/XP/vista/07

2 Front End ASP.NET

3 Language used C sharp(C #)

4 Back End MS-SQL server 2005

FRONT END AND BACK END

FRONT END:

The application has a front end that acts as an interface to the users of the application. The front

end is to be developed using .NET Framework (ASP.NET) which possess following features:

.Net Framework is a platform or development environment to seamlessly create web-applications that are accessible through client machines from across the globe.

.Net Framework is platform independent and language independent

.Net Framework enables you to use various off-the-shelf libraries that help the development of applications faster, easier, and cheaper

.Net Framework supports so many programming languages because of the concept of Common Language Runtime (CLR) engine. The CLR engine, instead of compiling the code into native code, compiles the code into Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL). The MSIL, a set of instructions, then translates the code into native code.

The .Net Framework provides a number of advantages such as fewer lines of code, complete compilation, ease of deployment, web settings and web.config, and caching

.Net Framework includes Web controls, Web forms, and server-side blocks of code are compiled when a page is requested for compilation.

Language used:

Language that we used for coding web pages is C sharp which is a multi-paradigm programming language encompassing imperative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines.

C# is one of the programming languages designed for the Common Language

Infrastructure.

C# language is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented

programming language.

The language, and implementations thereof, should provide support for software

engineering principles such as strong type checking, array bounds checking, detection of

attempts to use uninitialized variables, and automatic garbage collection. Software

robustness, durability, and programmer productivity are important.

C# is intended to be suitable for writing applications for both hosted and embedded

systems, ranging from the very large that use sophisticated operating systems, down to

the very small having dedicated functions.

BACK END:

The RDBMS used for designing the database for the project is SQL SERVER 2005.

SQL Server 2005 includes SQL Server Management Studio, a new integrated suite of management tools with the functionality to develop, deploy, and troubleshoot SQL Server databases, as well as enhancements to previous functionality.

SQL Server supports different data types, including primary types such as  Integer, Float, Decimal,  Char (including character strings),  Varchar (variable length character strings), binary (for unstructured blobs of data), Text (for textual data) among others.

With SQL Server 2005 developers can create database objects using familiar languages such as Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Basic .NET. Developers can also create two new objects—user-defined types and aggregates.

The security model in SQL Server 2005 separate users from objects, provides fine-grain access, and enables greater control of data access.

Additionally, all system tables are implemented as views, providing more control over database system objects.

Report Builder is a component of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services that enables business users to create and deploy reports with a user-friendly enterprise data model.

SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE

System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a conceptual model used in project

management that describes the stages involved in an information system development project,

from an initial feasibility study through maintenance of the completed application. System

Development Life Cycle (SDLC) means the cycle through which the candidate system goes

during it's development phase. To understand the system development, we need to recognize that

a candidate system has a life cycle, just like a living system or a new product. System analysis

and design are keyed to the system life cycle. The analyst must progress from one stage to the

other methodically, answering the key questions and achieving results in each stage. Until

software system is implemented and delivered to a customer and even after that the system

undergoes gradual development and evolution i.e. it is said to have a life cycle composed of

several stages and that life cycle is called system development life cycle and it consists of a set of

activities that the analysts, designers and users carry to develop an system.

Below is the detailed description of each stage of SDLC that is carried out in this project.

SYSTEM ANALYSIS

The main purpose of conducting system analysis is to study the various processes and to find out

its requirements.

System analysis has been conducted with the following objectives in mind:

1) Identify the user’ need mainly the students’ requirement.

2) Evaluate the system concept for feasibility.

3) Allocate functions to software, people, database, and other system elements.

4) Establish schedule constraints.

5) Create a system definition that forms the foundation for further stages of development.

System Analysis includes requirement analysis. All the necessary details required in the

analysis of our project are collected from the students, faculty and the staff members who are

going to use the software. The features that should be present in the software as felt from a

student’s point of view are analysed .The requirement analysis played an important role in

identifying what the college wants from the proposed system. All the analysis was done in

accordance to the user’s requirements so that the proper designing could be done and the

requirements can be fulfilled.

This is the phase during which the problem is identified, alternate system solutions are studied,

and recommendations are made about the proposed system.

Requirement

By studying the prevalent system in the department, the requirement for the Online Help Desk to

be implemented in the college has become crystal clear. The main requirement is to create a

database that should be manageable. Next important requirement is the generation of relevant

information from the database or specialized reports for the management. Another constraint was

that there is need of a platform through which Students can easily register their complaints

regarding different issues of the college and get updated periodically . Separate and independent

modules for maintaining student details, faculty details, staff details ,course details, etc. is to be

created. Feedback module is equally required to collect users’ responses and comments

regarding the performance of this website.

After understanding the problem definition and the requirement analysis in detail, preliminary

investigation was carried out for which different sources of information including students,

faculty, staff members and other on campus users were interviewed.

PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION

Students :

a) What is their views regarding the current manual system of complaint handling and query

processing?

b) What sort of problems do they face in activities related with administration cell ?

c) What sort of problems do they face in their departments regarding their academic cell.?

d) What types of information updates are needed?

e) What are their expectations from the online help desk websites?

f) What reports they desire on informational basis?

g) What are the outputs expected from the software?

Faculty :

a) What type of difficulty they face in handling student’s queries related to their academic reports?

b) What type of student’s queries they normally handle?

c) What information is required to be maintained?

d) What are the expectations from the software?

e) What are the outputs required from the software?

f) What reports they desire for internal monitoring of daily activities?

FEASIBILITY STUDY

Once the system objectives have been ascertained by initial investigation, the feasibility study is

conducted to check whether the system is feasible regarding following aspects.

Technical feasibility:

The technologies or the tools required for the project development are readily available and can be easily

integrated within the department.

Time feasibility:

Determines that the project can be implemented fully within a stipulated time frame or not.

Social feasibility:

Determines that the project will be fully acceptable by the users i.e. the students ,the faculty and

the staff members of the department.

ANALYSIS MODELS

Login

Faculty Student Staff

User id

password

Email id

Sec _ques Answer

User Type

reg_nonam

e

Rollno

Course

Branch

Dob

Year_of_adm

address

contact

email

Sex

ID

name

deptaddress

contact

subject

email

name

designation

contactaddr ess

Attendance

Result

Registers

ComplaintsAssigned to

ID

has

E-R DIAGRAM

Max_

class

Class_attend

Date_of_cm

plstatus

desc

Complain_id

type

Assign_date

email

Max_m

arks Mark_

obt

ta

Prac_marks

post

Feedback

Sr_no

fromcom

ments

date

1

M

N

N

N

11

11

1

M

Sub _code

Subject

Course id

Sub_name

got

Placement

email

name

payscaleYear

1

N

secured

in1

1

1

Created for

1

DATA FLOW DIAGRAM

CONTEXT LEVEL DATA FLOW DIAGRAM

User

Online Help

Desk

Logins

Uploads Information

Retrieves Information

Administrator

Maintains User Account

Generates Reports

Provides Information

Generates Reports

LEVEL 1 DATA FLOW DIAGRAM

Administrator

User Account Management

User Information Entry

User Account Information

Login

Enter UserID, Password

AssigneeAssigned to

Enter UserID, Password

Upload Marks

Marks

Marks Details

MarksheetReport Generation

Attendance UploadAttendance

Attendance Details

Register Complaint

Assigned by

Update Complaint Status

Complaint Details

Staff

Enter User Id, password

Uploads Details

Details

Student

Faculty

LEVEL 2 DATA FLOW DIAGRAMS

LEVEL 2 DATA FLOW DIAGRAM FOR LOGIN

LEVEL 2 DATA FLOW DIAGRAM FOR UPLOAD DETAILS

Faculty

Administrator

Student

1.1

Login

UserID,Password

UserID,Password

UserID,Password

User account information

Login information

1.2

Upload Details

Administrator

details

Student details

Faculty details

Staff details

Subject details

LEVEL 2 DATA FLOW DIAGRAM FOR REPORT GENERATION

LEVEL 2 DATA FLOW DIAGRAM FOR INFORMATION UPDATE/RETREIVAL

1.3

Report GenerationAttendance details

Student details

Faculty Details

Staff Details

Student details

Attendance

Faculty details

Staff details

Administrator Student Report

Faculty Report

Staff Report

Faculty

Display Marks Information

Marks Information

Marks Details

Retrieves Marks Information

Validate marks InformationMarks

Student Details

Student Information

Subject Details

Subject Information

Student

Marks

Student Performance Report

Marks details

marks Student

Attendance

Marks Faculty

DESIGN MODEL

In this software project, the spiral model is used for development. Because spiral model,

combines the iterative nature of prototyping with the controlled and systematic aspects of the

waterfall model, there in providing the potential for rapid development of incremental versions

of the software. In this model the software is developed in a series of incremental releases with

the early stages being either paper models or prototypes. Later iterations become increasingly

more complete versions of the product. So, overall this project has been developed in iterative

manner ,following all the stages of the development .but still it possess certain areas of

enhancements that can be done after once implemented for use so as to release its more advanced

version by incorporating the changes demanded by user.

The model is divided into a number of task regions. These regions are:

1. The customer communication task – to establish effective communication between developer

and customer.

2. The planning task – to define resources, time lines and other project related information.

3. The risk analysis task – to assess both technical and management risks.

4. The engineering task – to build one or more representations of the application.

5. The construction and release task – to construct, test, install and provide user support (e.g.,

documentation and training).

6. The customer evaluation task – to obtain customer feedback based on the evaluation of the

software representation created during the engineering stage and implemented during the install

stage.

NO. OF MODULES

DESCRIPTION OF MODULES

Admin:

Online Help Desk

Login

Student

Faculty

Staff

Attendance

Marks

Complaints

Course

Admin

Admin module is mainly concerned with the database activities like populating the database,

updation of and maintenance of database. As well as this module will be also responsible for the

creation and maintenance of user accounts and keeping track of various probable security issues.

Login:

Login module will take care of the user (student, faculty, staff , assignee) or the administrator

login into the system and allow them to use the system as per their access permission. It will

check the authorization of user and allow them to access the system.

Student:

Student module maintains the records of all the students in the college.

Faculty:

Faculty module maintains the details of all the faculties of various department of the college.

Staff:

Staff module maintains the details of all the staff members of various departments of the college

e.g.: administrative cell, account section, transports section etc.

Attendance:

Attendance module maintains and displays the attendance details of students and generates

attendance report.

Marks Details:

Faculty is authorized to update the sessional marks obtained by the students in their subject and

also enables the students to generate their performance report.

Complaints:

The complaint module provides the complaint details registered by the students, the details of

faculty and staff to whom the complaint is assigned to, by the assignee, status of the complaint

that is updated by faculty or staff who works on that complaint and also generates complaint

reports based on different criteria provided by users.

Course:

Course module list the details of the different courses offered by the college and list of subject

details for each course.

DETAILED DESIGN

DATA STRUCTURE OF THE TABLES

Login

Student_details

faculty_details

Staff_details

subject_details

Attendance

Result

Complaint_details

holiday

feedback

Placement

INPUT SCREENS

Home page

Placement

About us

Login

Admin page

Faculty page

Student page

Others page

Assignee page

Feed back page

REPORT GENERATION

Help Desk reports play a vital role as far as Help Desk product is concerned.

Reports that can be generated by this OHD Systems are listed below:

Reports of all requests.

Reports of completed requests.

Reports of pending requests.

Periodic reports to track the number of complaints logged within a specific time frame.

Customized reports that will filter out complaints based on various departments and facilities, as well as according to the request date.

Students’ attendance reports.

Performance reports.

Subject wise evaluation reports.

Misc. reports based on Students’ details, Faculty details, etc.

Attendance_report

Performance_report

Faculty_report

Student_report

Complaint_report

Complaint_ report