The Client

Stargazer invests in organizations, endeavors, and people that embody the entrepreneurial spirit. Stargazer creates collaborative environments - in real space and in cyberspace — for people and organizations to support and learn from one another. Stargazer is a virtual and physical place for an ongoing exchange of ideas in support for philanthropic education. Stargazer is located at the crossroads of entrepreneurship and technology, of philanthropy and the venture capital-backed New Economy. Pursuing both for-profit and not-for-profit endeavors, Stargazer provides entrepreneurs with tools and resources necessary to achieve their vision — to help them Make It So! ™Stargazer takes an exciting new approach to business and social entrepreneurship.

The Business Challenge:

• The Portal
  McFadyen Solutions's first challenge was to create a portal encompassing a system of integrated programs designed to make it easier for a user to find information about non-profits and knowledge on the web. Ultimately Stargazer wanted this portal, StargazerNET, to provide a sense of community online.
  
• "Quests" - On-line courses
  Stargazer wanted to create a process for online learning called Quests for their teacher and student user community. The overall goal for Quests was to leverage the vast amount of information on the internet to enhance the teaching and learning process.
  
• Personalization
  Stargazer wanted to leverage the power and capability of Dynamo to interact with their user in a more personal, targeted manner and to better understand user community behaviors overall using explicit and implicit personalization tools.
  

The Return on Investment

• The Portal
  Through McFadyen Solutions's design, Stargazer's vision and purpose for an online portal community was achieved. StargazerNET serves as an online community for people interested in the world of non-profit organizations/groups and related services. The portal includes a well-organized taxonomy that act as a "Living Library", tools to contribute knowledge to the Living Library. A powerful search engine was built search within the StargazerNET and on the internet.
  Other features of the StargazerNET portal include user chat, discussion forums, and featured sites. By virtue of the community building tools such as discussion threads and chat rooms, the site provides visitors a way to communicate with the community, ask questions and make comments about a specific topic. The combination of these interactive services and resources provides an overall sense of involvement, ownership, and community to all users.
  
• "Quests" - On-line courses
  In the McFadyen Solutions constructed solution, teachers create complete online experiences, including courses and quizzes, which are called "Quests". Quests can be edited by teachers and web links that provide information about a specific question can be added to the Quest and referenced by users. For example, if a student answers a question about the world's tallest mountain, reference links to mountain formation and geology may be displayed to the user dynamically (if the teacher had chosen to add them to the Quest). Quests transform the learning process by leveraging the vast amount of information on the web into a teaching and learning resource.
  
• Personalization
  The StargazerNET site provides a powerful, extensible, rules-driven personalization platform that makes it easy to target specific content to a particular user or group of users based on business rules created by business managers.
  
  StargazerNET personalization combines explicit user data collected from the users with implicit information gathered on user behavior. Technical platform information dynamically adjusts every element of content seen by an end-user at the time of request to increase the effectiveness of the content on StargazerNET site. Profile and behavioral data are continuously captured in an effort to serve users in effective ways.
  
  When a visitor first arrives at StargazerNET, the personalization component creates a profile and automatically associates that profile with an anonymous user. If a visitor registers or logs in, the profile is upgraded to an identified profile, preserving any information that was gathered up to that point. The personalization component enables business managers to create a set of rules, using both explicit user profile attributes, and behavior-based user data to control the presentation of the content and behavior of the site. The personalization component provides the ability to send customized messages to selected groups and individual site users based on profile data and on-site behavior.

The Technology

The technology used to drive the site are ATG Dynamo's Application, Personalization and Scenario servers. The site consisted of three repositories: the user profile repository; taxonomy repository; and asset repository. The profile repository maintains all data about system users, including explicit data entered through web forms and implicit data that the site automatically gathers. The taxonomy repository contains the category structure, links, keywords, resources, and the relationships among them. The asset repository contains data about featured links that will be targeted to users and shown in slots throughout the site. All three repositories have relationships among them. The repositories all have database tables that are mapped to Dynamo through XML files.

iChat's chat rooms and discussion boards are used as collaborative tools. These tools are tightly integrated with Dynamo, so the user can seamlessly move from Dynamo to iChat and vice versa. The integration is accomplished when the user registers for the site. After registering through Dynamo, their profile data is automatically sent to iChat and registered for that system.

Another large part of StargazerNET is a search facility. Users will be able to search throughout StargazerNET's category hierarchy and links. Initially the search is accomplished through a simple keyword search. A program visits each link on the site and retrieves its keywords. Integration with an external indexing and search engine is the next step. That search engine will visit all of our links and create an index to be searched. The matching results will be passed back to Dynamo for format and displayed to the user.

StargazerNET Architecture

The development environment consists of two machines. The ATG Dynamo product suite is installed on a Windows NT4.0 machine with 512 MB of RAM. The iPlanet 4.1 web server is installed on the same machine as Dynamo. The database software (MS SQL Server 7) and iChat software is installed on a NT4.0 machine with 256 MB of RAM.

The staging environment consists of two SUN Solaris 5.8 machines, both with 1 GB of RAM. One machine includes the Dynamo product suite, iChat product suite, and Apache 1.3.14 web server. JDK1.2.2_006 is the java version being used by Dynamo and iChat. The other SUN machine is the database server. Loaded on it is Informix Dynamo Server 2000 9.21.

The staging environment consists of two SUN Solaris 5.8 machines, both with 1 GB of RAM. One machine includes the Dynamo product suite, iChat product suite, and Apache 1.3.14 web server. JDK1.2.2_006 is the java version being used by Dynamo and iChat. The other SUN machine is the database server. Loaded on it is Informix Dynamo Server 2000 9.21.