webqem blog

The Federal Government have made a number of changes to the “super” environment since May 2006.

ZDNet recently featured an article on Fone Zone’s implementation of Adobe Connect, a solution that was recommended and implemented by webqem. Fone Zone had, in the past, trained employees using PowerPoint. The impetus had been on Fone Zone’s employees to go online and download the presentations themselves. webqem’s solution using Adobe Connect, allows Fone Zone to deliver live PowerPoint content to mulitple employees at once. Read the whole article here.

Computerworld recently featured an article about webqem’s implementation of Adobe Connect for ING Australia. The article explains the issues that ING Australia faced with their current training process and how Adobe Connect was able to streamline this process, by providing an ongoing help system that is contextual and relevant. Read the whole article here.

The Challenge

Hyundai Motor Company Australia had a requirement to assess 1400 technicians across Australia within a month. Their specific requirements were:

• Assessment for three different technician levels.
• Each assessment would be timed for 60 minutes and consist of 40 multiple choice questions that would be pulled randomly from its own unique pool of up to 120 questions.
• Each assessment would consist of varying quantities of questions, based on three levels of difficulty: easy, even and hard.
• Marking of the assessment would only occur once the participant had indicated that they’d completed or if the exam had timed out.
• Participants would be allowed to review the exam results once completed.
• The assessment participants would be tracked on their number of attempts.
• For Hyundai’s analysis, the solution also needed to collect data on the questions, such as how often a question was successfully answered and which answers were selected for each question.

The Solution

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On 15 November Google announced that Yahoo and MSN would join Google in supporting a common Sitemap Protocol. Information about the agreement has been placed on a new site at Sitemaps.org

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Following the launch of their website, Loganholme Cinemas have launched their new HTML email showcasing their latest movies and special offers. Utilising a template that webqem created, each issue is easily edited and managed in-house using Adobe Contribute.

the ReGeneration wanted to display the most popular categories

As a contributor to Builder AU I was unable to submit an entry in the recent Adobe/Builder AU Flex Developer Derby, but I decided to build something just the same – a Flex video show & snap app. The main features? Video playback with captioning/translations; image grabbing of the video content; annotation of the image grabs and printing of both the notes and the images themselves. (more…)

The Black Dog Institute has a clear vision about how to help as many people as possible using their website – the Bipolar Disorder educational program is an example of how they have put that vision into action. The information supplied by the program is in audiovisual format (Macromedia Breeze presentations) as well as PDF. The power of seeing and hearing from experts in the bipolar disorder field is a corner stone of this program. The institute has gone one step further in their mission to effectively distribute information about biploar disorder by inviting feedback from users. The feedback is collected using a Macromedia Breeze (now Adobe Connect) presentation containing online Quiz questions. The questions are multichoice and freeform text entry. Answers are collected at a statistical level rather than individual.

The whole online Bipolar Education program has also been created on CD for distribution to users in the bush and remote areas.

I’ve seen a little bit of discussion on the Flexcoders mailing list recently regarding saving images created in a flex app to the server. Most of the solutions revolved around using HTTP to get the image from the flash player to the server. This had proved difficult for numerous reason. So I set out to try and find a simpler way. Now knowing that AMF is a binary protocol I figured it must be possible to send the binary image data to the server using Remoting.

And indeed it is. In fact it’s stunningly simple. The actual heavy lifting has already been done for us by Tinic Uro in his Image Encoding classes. All I had to do was capture the image data, encode it using Tinic’s classes and then send it to a ColdFusion CFC via remoting. I’ve put it up as a demo so you can see it in action.

The flex part is standard Remoting so you can look at the code in the download to see that part but the ColdFusion is shown below.

<cffunction name="upload" access="remote" returntype="string">
	<cfargument name="ext" type="string" required="true">
	<cfargument name="img" type="binary" required="true">

	<cfset var name = "image" & dateFormat(now(), "yyyymmdd") &
		timeFormat(now(), "HHmmss") & "." & arguments.ext>

	<cffile action="write" file="#expandPath("..\images\#name#")#"
		output="#img#" addnewline="false" >

	<cfreturn "/images/#name#">
</cffunction>

As you can see the code required in ColdFusion to do a relatively complex task is minimal, it can all be boiled down to two things:

1. Setting the argument type of the image data to binary (I’m not even sure this is required).
2. Using the cffile tag to save that binary data to a file.

See I told you it was simple. Feel free to download the Image Upload Code and try it out for youself.