Dynamic product development of a new Intranet platform

Abstract

A new method of using dynamic product development (DPD) described for hardware product development has now also been tested for software development. This project was the development of a new Intranet platform called e-Professor. The e-Professor has a new mindset compared to the common pyramidal architecture used in most portals. The new mindset is spherical in nature which means that transfer of information and links from/to different parts of the portal are much more quickly achieved when compared to traditional portals. This new function saves a lot of time and effort especially, say, for teachers and lecturers who could have large numbers of students attending classes and courses. In order to test it as an application, the new portal e-Professor, has been tested as an e-learning portal in the course “Product Development” at three different universities in Sweden in 2002. Another application in 2002 has been to test it as a net portal for 30–50 unemployed persons in the city of Karlstad, Sweden. The investigations show that the technical objective, which was to make a simple, clear and user-friendly flexible portal, has been accomplished most satisfactorily. Thus, DPD has also been shown to work well for software development.