Digital Excellence Platform

CLIENT

Fontys

A lot of employees and students of FHICT create a lot of nice products. As a hobby, for their work or because of a school project. These can be software solutions, small scripts, research papers, thesis but possibly also project ideas and proposals for others to pick up. Unfortunately, most of them remain private and are not known by the majority of the population. The goal of the DeX-platform (short: DeX) is to make all this work more findable and thus improving collaboration.

Built for everyone

DeX.software

A lot of employees and students of FHICT create a lot of nice products. As a hobby, for their work or because of a school project. These can be software solutions, small scripts, research papers, thesis but possibly also project ideas and proposals for others to pick up. Unfortunately, most of them remain private and are not known by the majority of the population. The goal of the DeX-platform (short: DeX) is to make all this work more findable and thus improving collaboration.



Commonly heard criticism is that “we already have GitLab for this”. This, however, is only one specific source. A content creator can choose to use a different platform for its project. DeX will search for all sources that are linked to the platform. Moreover, GitLab is mostly used in software development. Research papers, for instance, have a different source. We want to find all relevant information and thus search in all available sources, not only GitLab.

The benefits of using DeX will include, but probably not be limited to:



VISIBILITY

Projects that are now only known by a small group of people will be more visible to the whole community. This increases the visibility of innovative solutions as well as their collaborators.



COLLABORATE

People can easily find the collaborators of a project (proposal) and collaborate with them more easily. This creates a sort of open-source community in which all our collaborative ideas are shared.



AGGREGATE

People have a better overview of their own work. This can be useful for instance when maintaining a portfolio or using examples in class, both as a teacher as well as a student. A student can show his or her previous work and maybe even demonstrate certain learning outcomes within that particular semester.



SHOWCASE

Administrators can more easily find good examples of innovative solutions (showcases) that are built by the community. This can then, for instance, be used for promotional use. The interesting projects will be praised by the community and will be identified sooner and more easily. Such projects can then be put on the website of FHICT for instance.



CENTRALIZE

It can be a central place where all project proposals can be gathered. Internships, minors, challenges for certain semesters such as Open Innovation all have their own format and system where employees and students need to work with. This can all potentially be grouped into one system.



SUGGEST

DeX can suggest interesting projects for you as a person, based on interest such as techniques, a certain topic or based on the collaborators which (some of them) you follow and/or share the same interests. This way you will be informed and up-to-date with the latest news and trends.

New platform that uses a modern tech stack for an open source project

The platform was separated in the backend and the frontend. The backend uses .NET Core 3.1 and makes use of other frameworks like IdentityServer 4 to connect with other identity providers such as Fontys or Surf.
The frontend is built in Angular 9 and is set up using a modular architecture.
Both of these projects have full continuous integration set up using Github Actions, with features like automatic code coverage, integrated SonarQube, automatic integration tests using Postman, unit tests, and more! We've also set up automatic deployment by using Github Actions and Docker. Upon pushing to develop, a new version is put online on the staging environment, upon pushing to master, a new production version is pushed. All of this is done automatically, without any manual intervention needed.

Made by Delta students

SPRING 2021
Ruben Fricke - Project lead & development
Niray Mak - Project lead & development
Damien Kusters - Back-end development
Joep Verhoeven - Back-end development
Jurjen Verbruggen - Back-end development
Max van Hattum - Back-end development
Ramon Peek - Back-end development
Tim Snoek - Back-end development
Fleur van Osta - Full stack development
Walter Sajtos - Full stack development
Lieke van der Voort - Design & front-end development

FALL 2020
Brend Smits - Project lead & development
Ruben Fricke - Full stack development
Walter Sajtos - Full stack development
Niray Mak - Back-end development
Dave Bouman - Back-end development
Mees van Straten - Back-end development
Niek van Dam - Back-end development
Lieke van der Voort - Design & front-end develpoment
Davey Hurkmans - Design & front-end development
Julia Slaats - Design & front-end development
Devon Caris - Design & front-end development
Elmira Drost - Infrastructure management

SPRING 2020

The first release of the Digital Excellence platform took 15 weeks, from idea to fully implemented with infrastructure and all.
13 Delta Members worked tirelessly on the platform, each fulfilling their own roll.

Max Korlaar - User Experience & Frontend Development
Rebecca Zwijnenburg - User Experience & Frontend Development
Rens van der Linden - Development & Infrastructure Management
Ruben Brugman - Frontend Technical Lead & Frontend Development
Elaine Heijboer - User Experience & Frontend Development
Joris Coenen - Full Stack Development
Jurjen Verbruggen - Backend Development
Ramon Peek - Backend Development
René van Vliet - Full Stack Development
Rens Nooren - Frontend Non-technical Lead & Frontend Development
Stijn Groenen - Architecture Lead & Full Stack Development
Kasper Hämäläinen - Governance
Brend Smits - Project Leader & Development