Notification Center

Context

During my professional bachelor's degree, I joined for one year the development unit of the Digital and Information Systems Department of the Eurométropole de Strasbourg. Staff there use an intranet and many business applications. Each one generates its own alerts, which multiplies logins and password re-entries. The notification center brings these alerts together in the same place, reachable from the intranet.

What I did

I took over an existing project in PHP and jQuery, structured in MVC, and made it reliable. Code review, rework of the style sheets, handling of the schedule's edge cases.

I then developed and extended the business modules.

• Working time. Tracking of clock-ins, leave and overtime, with anomalies reported straight to human resources.
• Invoices. Alerts on documents awaiting approval in the financial paperless workflow.
• Responsible digital use. Alerts on the consumption of the mailbox and of personal disk space.
• Org chart. Notification of updates to the reference directory.

Each member of staff configures their modules and their notifications. Their preferences are stored in the database in JSON format. An administration interface manages roles, announcements and user feedback.

The main technical point came from the service queried each time the intranet was opened. It took 11 seconds to respond, which blocked the release to production. Rework of the data model, ordering of the module analysis, access rules by profile, the response time dropped to about 2 seconds.

Outcome

The developments are in production and used by the authority's staff. At the start of my apprenticeship, I had also improved the application managing elected representatives' speaking turns in session, used at every council sitting.