Web Development for Shaw Communications

Shaw Communications is Canada's second largest cable television operator. In the last several years, Shaw Communications has expanded its business to include high-bandwidth Internet connectivity for the business and consumer markets.

System Architect
Web Developer

Technology

Active Server Pages (ASP)
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS)
Oracle 7.3
Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 (VB)
Microsoft Visual Interdev

Project Description

I worked on two projects while at Shaw Communications. My role on the first project was as a system architect and lead web developer for an intranet-based tool for the Shaw@Home Help Desk. For the second project I was one of several senior developers for the DMX Customer Care system.

I unfortunately do not have any screenshots from the Shaw@Home Help Desk application that my team developed. However, as part of this project I was responsible for introducing several web development best practices. Included in my list of recommendations was the use of unit testing, integration testing, and source control (Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe). I worked on putting the infrastructure in place for such practices as well as producing several straightforward, step-by-step documents describing the processes. One such document described how to create a Microsoft Visual Interdev project from Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (right).

I also worked on the DMX Customer Care project. DMX is a digital music service provided by Shaw
Communications. As with many services, Shaw needed to track customers, sales people, technicians, and billing details.

The application we built used detail screens to present information. However, to reduce loading times
we used a system whereby the screen is first loaded with sections minimized. To see a section, the user would click an icon beside the section name and that section would trigger a call to the web server and then expand downward to present the information returned by the web server.

If you click on the customer profile thumbnail (right) a new window will open with a prototype of the
Customer Profile page. Click on the folder icon beside the Messages section to see that section open. Clicking on the icon beside the record in the Messages section will open an edit window. The entire application design is based on the collapsible/expandable detail view shown in this HTML prototype.

Note that many of the links in this prototype have been disabled and the main menu that appears at the top of the screen has been deactivated to limit the number of pages accessible by this example.