Digirati

Case Study - Oxford University Press

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The Implementation

The initial stage of the project involved a series of workshops to understand existing business processes and develop optimal new processes based on the capabilities of eRights in line with identified business needs. Use Cases and Use Case Realisations were established followed by License, Access and Data Modelling.

eRights was set up as a hosted service rather than running on their own infrastructure alongside the web applications. The hosted eRights repository exposes a set of web services for OUP's Group website applications to consume. These web services define an OUP-specific set of business logic, which provides a clean architectural boundary and separation of concerns.

This framework is a clean, extensible platform. It provides multiple extension hooks for product-specific business logic to run. For example, in one site that uses this framework the registration process requires the user to redeem a soft token printed in a textbook - this behavior is plugged in to the framework for this particular web application.

The existing legacy user base for OUP's Group website was mapped and migrated to the new eRights repository using custom scripts.

One of OUP's more custom requirements was that a user's interaction with the Access Control screens should adopt the branding of the particular "product" the user is trying to access, or register for. Another customisation in the OUP project was the extensive capturing of marketing-related data on a product-by-product basis. Admin users can create groups of questions that they can associate with a product; these questions are then rendered using HTML forms components for a user to answer when registering for a product or viewing their profile.

Key Deliverables

OUP now have a system that is better for its customer end users as well as better for OUP staff. End users can manage all their OUP Group website "products" from a single "My Profile" interface - they can request new products, maintain their details, see when their licences will expire, change their login details and so on.

OUP admin users can now create new Group Website products without any IT department involvement. Here's an example:

Suppose a new textbook is going to be published. This will have an Online Resource Centre micro-site, with an area containing lecturer resources and an area containing student resources. If a user registers for the lecturer resources, they won't be granted access until they have confirmed their email address (an automated process) and been verified as a lecturer (a manual process). The business team come up with a set of questions (some free-text, others single valued selects, others multiple-choice, etc) that they want the lecturers to answer.

On the other hand, Users registering for the student area will be asked to enter a code printed in the book. The back end knows about these codes and will verify that the code entered is valid and hasn't been redeemed before. The users also have questions to answer before they can register (different questions in this case).

The business users can create the micro-site with its two separate protected sub-areas using their Content Management System, but crucially they can also configure all the access control related features above using nothing more than a simple web interface. End users will see highly customised sign up processes, but at no point was any further development work necessary to get the micro-site up and running and protected.

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