Outsourcing Gateway - Graduation Project 2011

ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF GAZA FACULTY OF ENGINEERING COMP. ENG. DEPARTMENT OUTSOURCING GATEWAY Supervisor: Prof. Mohammed A. Mikki Project Team: Ahmed Omar Abu Elkhair Ahmed Adnan Hassouna To Our Parents ,,, Thanks ,,, Abstract Nowadays, outsourcing became a very growing term used in business especially in the modern countries. In this project we are going to introduce this principle to our people by employing it as an application that offer freelance jobs to our graduates who are suffering from high rates of unemployment. Our project is a web-based portal that allows businessmen or small companies to offer freelance projects to be done by the qualified graduates and got them paid for their tasks. Freelance work is the future of employment and this can be showed clearly in modern countries as most of their graduates go toward the work as freelancers. We have built our system using ASP.Net and uploaded it to a special domain to be available for public. Finally, we have introduced a chapter to study the opportunity for this project to get success in real world. I|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................................... I Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................................... II List of Figures ......................................................................................................................................................... IV List of Tables ........................................................................................................................................................... VI Introduction .............................................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 2 1.1 Project Description ...................................................................................................................................... 2 1.2 Problem Definition ....................................................................................................................................... 2 1.3 Introduction to IT Outsourcing .............................................................................................................. 3 1.4 Related Works ................................................................................................................................................ 5 1.5 Our Contribution ........................................................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 2: Used Technology and Tools .................................................................................................. 10 2.1 ASP.Net with C# Programming Language ...................................................................................... 10 2.2 Microsoft SQL Server 2008.................................................................................................................... 13 2.3 Adobe Inc. Suite .......................................................................................................................................... 14 2.3.1 Adobe Photoshop CS5 ..................................................................................................................... 14 2.3.2 Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 .............................................................................................................. 14 2.3.3 Adobe Illustrator CS5 ...................................................................................................................... 14 2.4 Microsoft Office 2007 Package ............................................................................................................ 15 2.4.1 Microsoft Word 2007 ...................................................................................................................... 15 2.4.2 Microsoft Visio 2007 ........................................................................................................................ 15 2.4.3 Microsoft Project 2007 ................................................................................................................... 15 2.5 Other Technologies and Tools ............................................................................................................. 16 2.5.1 JavaScript .............................................................................................................................................. 16 2.5.2 AJAX ......................................................................................................................................................... 16 2.5.3 FlashFXP 4.0 ........................................................................................................................................ 16 II | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Chapter 3: Software Requirements Specification ............................................................................ 17 3.1 Functional Requirements ....................................................................................................................... 17 3.2 Non-Functional Requirements ............................................................................................................ 19 3.3 System Specification ................................................................................................................................. 20 Chapter 4: Database Design .......................................................................................................................... 24 4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 24 4.2 Database Tables.......................................................................................................................................... 24 4.3 Entity Relationship Diagram ................................................................................................................ 25 4.4 Relational Database Model .................................................................................................................... 27 Chapter 5: Website Programming and Design .................................................................................. 31 5.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 31 5.2 Root Directory ............................................................................................................................................. 32 5.3 Interface Pages ............................................................................................................................................ 34 5.4 User Control Panel..................................................................................................................................... 40 5.5 Admin Control Panel ................................................................................................................................ 43 Chapter 6: Website Hosting and Testing ............................................................................................... 50 6.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 50 6.2 Web Hosting ................................................................................................................................................. 50 6.3 Website Testing .......................................................................................................................................... 53 Chapter 7: Business Management ............................................................................................................. 59 7.1 Operations Management ........................................................................................................................ 59 7.2 Development Plan ..................................................................................................................................... 60 7.3 Outsourcing Gateway Business Model ............................................................................................. 61 7.4 Market Analysis .......................................................................................................................................... 62 7.5 Marketing Strategy .................................................................................................................................... 63 7.6 Financial Plan .............................................................................................................................................. 64 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................... 65 References ............................................................................................................................................................... 66 III | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. List of Figures Figure 1.1: Freelancer.com API Calls .............................................................................................................. 6 Figure 1.2: List of Projects in Translatorbase.com ................................................................................... 8 Figure 3.1: Specifications and Details of Businessman Actor .......................................................... 21 Figure 3.2: Specifications and Details of Freelancer Actor ................................................................ 22 Figure 3.3: Specifications and Details of Administrator Actor ........................................................ 23 Figure 4.1: Abstract ER Diagram ................................................................................................................... 25 Figure 4.2: ER Diagram with Full Details................................................................................................... 26 Figure 4.3: Relational Database Model using Visio 2007 ................................................................... 27 Figure 4.4: Relational Database Model using Visio 2007 ................................................................... 28 Figure 4.5: Relational Database Diagram using MS SQL Server 2008 .......................................... 29 Figure 4.6: Relational Database Diagram using MS SQL Server 2008 .......................................... 30 Figure 5.1: Register Page Form ...................................................................................................................... 34 Figure 5.2: Register Page (Adding CV)........................................................................................................ 35 Figure 5.3: Rating Page Content .................................................................................................................... 38 Figure 5.4: Recover Password Screen ......................................................................................................... 38 Figure 5.5: User Profile Data ........................................................................................................................... 40 Figure 5.6: Listing Specific User Projects .................................................................................................. 41 Figure 5.7: Help Request Form ...................................................................................................................... 42 Figure 5.8: Adding New Exam ........................................................................................................................ 44 Figure 5.9: Bids Counter Report .................................................................................................................... 46 Figure 5.10: Sample Financial Report ......................................................................................................... 47 Figure 5.11: Adding New Category .............................................................................................................. 48 Figure 5.12: Sample Banner used in the Website .................................................................................. 49 Figure 6.1: Webhosting Control Panel ........................................................................................................ 52 Figure 6.2: Website Main Interface .............................................................................................................. 53 Figure 6.3: Members Control Panel Interface ......................................................................................... 54 Figure 6.4: Admin Control Panel Interface ............................................................................................... 55 IV | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 6.5: YSlow Performance Test ........................................................................................................... 56 Figure 6.6: Page Speed Test ............................................................................................................................. 57 Figure 6.7: Performance Summary .............................................................................................................. 58 Figure 7.1: Outsourcing Gateway Business Model ................................................................................ 61 Figure 7.2: Income Statement and Cash Flow ......................................................................................... 64 Figure 7.3: Balance Sheet at the End of Second Year ........................................................................... 64 V|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. List of Tables Table 4.1: List of Database Tables and their Description ................................................................... 24 Table 5.1: Website Folder Names and their Description ................................................................... 31 Table 5.2: Project Stages and Description ................................................................................................. 37 Table 6.1: Web Hosting Features .................................................................................................................. 51 VI | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Introduction Outsourcing is any task, operation, job or process that could be performed by employees within an organization, but is instead contracted to a third party (freelancers in our case) for a significant period of time. In this project we are combining the principle of outsourcing and freelancing to be one IT application that can serve thousands of students or graduates to earn money by doing specific tasks. We think that if this project successfully applied it will solve a very tiring problem in our community which is the unemployment between IT graduates. Our project business model will be to connect businessmen or companies from all around the world to post small tasks or projects to be done and completed with our qualified students or graduates. In this report we will show the overall process of designing our web-based project from the beginning to the end, we will start the report by giving an overall description about the project, and then we will introduce the tools we have used during the operation of building our project. In the third chapter we will show the software requirements specifications then we will move to our first technical operation which is database design of our website. In the fifth and sixth chapters we will show all components in our website and specific interfaces with programming codes for critical segments and functions then we will make a performance test for our final project to identify our weakness and strengthens. In the last chapter we will introduce a brief study about our project business management which include operation management, marketing and financial issues. 1|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Project Description This project considered as an application on one of the most common terms that recently appeared and used in the Information Technology field and business world. Our main web-based service we are providing is to connect businessmen or employers who have projects to be done with freelancers who are qualified to complete these projects. Our provided service will be useful for big slice of people beside us. It will provide an effective solution to graduates, students or any interested person looking for a job and so will reduce the high rates of unemployment especially in Information Technology fields by spreading the culture of freelance work in Palestine. There’re two terms will repeated frequently in this report. 1. Employer or Businessman: (e’s the one who post a project to be done. 2. Freelancer: (e’s the one who apply to win this project. 1.2 Problem Definition )t’s clearly appeared that Palestine and the Arabic world in general suffering from high rates of unemployment especially in the field of Information technology, even though this field is open widely all over the world. We are in this project providing a solution to this problem by encourage those people who haven’t any jobs to work as 2|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. freelancers and never wait for a long governmental job which may kill his creativity as he/she will never try to increase his abilities or ambitions. In the foreign world most people have been self employment or work as part times only and upon their production they earn. This way of working is currently unavailable in Palestine and that’s why there are huge numbers of unemployment. This website we are building may help people to change their views about work and move toward the freelance work. 1.3 Introduction to IT Outsourcing We found that many people around the country still don’t know what actually the meaning of outsourcing is, thus we have made this section to introduce IT outsourcing in its abstract meaning. IT outsourcing is the practice of subcontracting responsibility for all or part of an IT function to a third-party service provider that manages the work. Businesses use IT outsourcing for functions ranging from infrastructure to software development, maintenance and support.  IT Outsourcing Advantages The reasons for outsourcing IT are varied but some of the most frequently cited drivers include: - Reducing IT costs through efficiencies and economies of scale on the part of the service provider - Access to world-class IT skills, experience and resources - Removing non-core business - Minimizing sizeable capital expenditure on IT infrastructure 3|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. - Certainty of future IT spend - Reduce time to market — the acceleration of the development or production of a product through the additional capability brought by the supplier. In practice the benefits of outsourcing tend to be spread across the previous areas. Those seeking to outsource to achieve cost reductions alone may very well be disappointed.  IT Outsourcing Disadvantages - A loss of control over a crucial business service - A lack of flexibility in the services received - Damage to staff morale/culture clashes (between the service provider and customer) - The distraction of having to manage the relationship with the service provider The use of IT outsourcing is likely to grow in 2010. A recent survey conducted by the Gartner Group found that 85 percent of companies plan to increase or maintain their spending with external service providers (ESPs) when the economy gets better. )t’s clearly appeared that these definitions concentrate on outsourcing for companies, but in this project we are concentrating on outsourcing to individual people which may be called as freelance work. Many companies around the world seek to outsource small-businesses to individual people because outsourcing to other companies will cost them too much. 4|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 1.4 Related Works There’re some related works and projects that strongly similar to our project, these projects grow exponentially in the last few years. Here we will concentrate on the most successful stories and show their business specifications. Freelancer.com is the biggest community of virtual jobs on the Internet which apply widely the principle of outsourcing.  Details about the website: - This website built using PHP. - Established in 2004 with limited works and expanded in 2009. - Currently have about 2 millions registered users. - More than 900,000 projects completed in this website. - Multiple payment Methods, mainly use PayPal.  How it works? The basic idea of this website is to build a web-based virtual community of employers and freelancers. Employers will add requests and projects to be completed within a limited time specified by them. Freelancers can apply bids to win any added project by specifying the amount of money they need to do the business. More than one freelancer can apply to the same project, but only one can be chosen by the employer. There’re several laws rule the relationship between freelancers and employers. 5|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  What Projects can be outsourced? - Logo design, business cards, graphic design - Website design - Technical support your website or computer - Market research - Typesetting of brochures, manuals, catalogues - Translation of website or other documents - Preparation of PowerPoint presentations - Product design or manufacturing - Search Engine Optimization of your website Figure 1.1 - Freelancer.com API Calls 6|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Virtual Worker is a web-based marketplace that connects businesses in need of computer programming expertise with a global, freelance market of programmers. It also connects businesses and freelancers in the areas of graphic design, writing, translation and numerous other services.  Details about the website: - This website built using ASP.Net. - Established in 2001 and started to grow in 2006. - Currently have about 315,000 registered users. - More than 250,000 projects completed in this website. - Multiple payment Methods, mainly use PayPal.  How it works? Buyers looking for business or personal help, post their project on the Virtual Worker web site. The project is distributed to 315,000 workers world-wide, and they can ask questions and place a bid to complete the work. The results are often very quick: 12.4 workers typically make a bid within the first twenty four hours. The buyer then browses through each bidder’s responses, resume, certifications and previous work history (including comments and ratings left by previous buyers) on the site. If the buyer's deadline is especially tight, they may also require bidders to guarantee on-time completion with a forfeitable deposit called the Expert Guarantee. 7|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Translatorsbase.com is the leading provider of translation services via network of global high quality service providers. Translatorsbase.com is a source of translation jobs and provides tools and services to help you bring your translation business to the next level. This website requires a premium membership from users to participate and apply for posted projects. Figure 1.2 - List of Projects in Translatorbase.com 8|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 1.5 Our Contribution Simply, we are doing this research to present a new value to our people and open new work gates by teaching them the principle of outsourcing and so the culture of freelance work. Everyone can note that many graduates have no jobs even though they have very good capabilities; they only need a chance to be creative and contribute to our community. Most graduates in modern countries starting their work life as freelance workers, they grow and grow until they reach their needs. In this research we are trying to direct our people to a creative way of thinking instead of waiting a governmental job or any kind of long-term jobs. We are building a website as application to apply the principle of outsourcing and freelance work, this website may suffering of some limitations but we are mainly provide abstract idea that could be improved in future. If our project message succeed and arrived to its destination as we are planning then there’ll be many advantages and contributions to our community:  Reduce the high rates of unemployment.  Increase graduates creativity by giving them a chance to work quickly even in small projects.  Hard and good work will be essential to most people because their works quality will propose them and increase their chances to win projects in future.  Decreasing unemployment rates will improve country economic.  Spreading a new creative culture Freelance work culture between youth. 9|Page Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Chapter 2 Used Technology and Tools We have used many tools and applications during our design process. In this chapter we will introduce these tools and explain how we employed it in our Project. 2.1 ASP.Net with C# Programming Language ASP.Net stands for Active Server Pages, it’s a web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services. ASP.NET takes an object-oriented programming approach to Web page execution. Every element in an ASP.NET page is treated as an object and run on the server. An ASP.Net page gets compiled into an intermediate language by a .Net Common Language Runtime-compliant compiler. Then a JIT compiler turns the intermediate code to native machine code, and that machine code is eventually run on the processor and because the code is run straight from the processor, pages load much faster than classic ASP pages, where embedded VBScript or JScript had to be continuously interpreted and cached. We are using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 as an integrated development environment (IDE) to code and design our website. We have chosen this environment because it’s widely supported around the world and very friendly and easy to use. This edition of Visual Studio use .Net Framework 3.5 as an intermediate language to compile the code. Our code will be written in C# because we are much familiar with its syntax than VB language. 10 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Advantages of Using ASP.Net - ASP.NET drastically reduces the amount of code required to build large applications. - ASP.NET makes development simpler and easier to maintain with an eventdriven, server-side programming model. - ASP.NET pages are easy to write and maintain because the source code and HTML are together. - The source code is executed on the server. The pages have lots of power and flexibility by this approach, - The source code is compiled the first time the page is requested. Execution is fast as the Web Server compiles the page the first time it is requested. The server saves the compiled version of the page for use next time the page is requested. - The HTML produced by the ASP.NET page is sent back to the browser. The application source code you write is not sent and is not easily stolen. - ASP.NET makes for easy deployment. There is no need to register components because the configuration information is built-in. - Web server continuously monitors the pages, components and applications running on it. If it notices memory leaks, infinite loops, other illegal software or activities, it seamlessly kills those activities and restarts itself. - ASP.NET validates information (validation controls) entered by the user without writing a single line of code. - ASP.NET applications run faster and counter large volumes of users without performance problems. 11 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Disadvantages of Using ASP.Net - One main disadvantage is that ASP.NET applications can only run on Windows platform. - The control of the code is inbuilt with the web server controls so you have no much of direct control on these controls. - It is expensive.  Differences between ASP.Net and Client-Side Technologies Client-side refers to the browser and the machine running the browser. Serverside on the other hand refers to a Web server. - Client-Side Scripting Client-side scripting executes in the browser after the page is loaded. Both, HTML and the script are together in the same file and the script is downloaded as part of the page which anyone can view. A client-side script runs only on a browser that supports scripting and specifically the scripting language that is used. Since the script is in the same file as the HTML and as it executes on the machine you use, the page may take longer time to download. - Server-Side Scripting ASP.NET is purely server-side technology. ASP.NET code executes on the server before it is sent to the browser. The code that is sent back to the browser is pure HTML and not ASP.NET code. Like client-side scripting, ASP.NET code is similar in a way that it allows you to write your code alongside HTML. Unlike client-side scripting, ASP.NET code is executed on the server and not in the browser. The script that you write alongside your HTML is not sent back to the browser and that prevents others from stealing the code you developed. 12 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 2.2 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 The term SQL stands for Structured Query Language; SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) from Microsoft that's designed for the enterprise environment. SQL Server runs on T-SQL (Transact -SQL), a set of programming extensions from Sybase and Microsoft that add several features to standard SQL, including transaction control, exception and error handling, row processing, and declared variables. We have used MS SQL Server 2008 in the design process of database and this was the first technical process we did in the project.  Benefits of using MS SQL Server 2008 - High level of data compression resulting in less storage of tables indexes etc. and will be very useful while we restore the SQL data. - Complete security and reliability of data with robust backup functions. - Support stored procedures which are lines of code that are called by the application. They are placed on the server, and they are pre-compiled for quicker response times. The use of stored procedures also centralizes code, so troubleshooting bad database requests can be observed by a database admin. - Higher level of resource governance where the administrators can check the usage of CPU and other hardware resources. - High level of back up compression database will be automatically compressed. Options for storing it in a tape or a hard drive. - Scalability, and this means that it has the ability to grow when the business becomes bigger. - )t’s widely used around the world and so we can find support easily to any problem we face. 13 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 2.3 Adobe Inc. Suite We have used three applications from Adobe Inc. during our implementation, here we will sort these applications and show how we have employed them in our project. 2.3.1 Adobe Photoshop CS5 Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing application popular for its extensive amount of features. Photoshop is also, currently, the leading graphics editing application. We have used Adobe Photoshop to design and edit the images of our website template. 2.3.2 Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 software empowers designers and developers to build standards-based websites with confidence. Design visually or directly in code, develop pages with CMS, and accurately test browser compatibility. We have used this application in designing the layouts of our website and adding effects with HTML code. 2.3.2 Adobe Illustrator CS5 Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Systems, it’s so popular application for artists. We have used this application for designing logo and banners of the website. 14 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 2.4 Microsoft Office 2007 Package We have used three applications from the famous MS Office package; we mainly use these applications during our documentation and designing the process of the project cycle. Here we will introduce these applications briefly. 2.4.1 Microsoft Word 2007 Microsoft Word is a word processing program. Microsoft Word is used to create, view, edit, save and print electronic documents. We mainly used this application in writing reports and documents along the term. 2.4.2 Microsoft Visio 2007 Microsoft Visio is a proprietary and commercial diagramming program for Microsoft Windows that uses vector graphics to create diagrams. We have used this application widely to design database models, processes and diagrams. 2.4.3 Microsoft Project 2007 Microsoft Project (or MSP or WinProj) is a project management software program developed and sold by Microsoft which is designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets and analyzing workloads. We have used this application to schedule our tasks during the implementation of the project. 15 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 2.5 Other Technologies and Tools During our implementation we have use several technologies and some tools and these tools have only limited functions. Here we will introduce these technologies and tools and show where we have used them. 2.5.1 JavaScript JavaScript is a scripting language compatible with most browsers. It allows web developers to write interactive web pages that can respond to user input (e.g. validating information entered in a form, highlighting links when the mouse is over them, opening pages in new window etc...). We have used JavaScript in the admin and user control panels; we did that to give them an interactive interface to be user friendly pages. 2.5.2 AJAX AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. We have used AJAX technology in some parts of our website like the user’s text area editor which is full of features and design options. 2.5.3 FlashFXP 4.0 FlashFXP is a proprietary, well-established, and mature FTP client application developed by OpenSight Software LLC. 16 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Chapter 3 Software Requirements Specification In this chapter we will introduce the detailed requirements specification and architecture of our system. 3.1 Functional Requirements The website must do certain things to support the business objectives and these functions need to be clearly defined.  Interface Personalization We are trying as much as we can to introduce a user friendly interface; we have followed the web design standards. Users can fully control their profiles and contributions. The main interface is simple and contains most links that user may think of it like Sign-in, registration, about us and etc…  Search Engine Optimization We believe that our project will never success until we optimize it to fit search engines specifications and criteria, so for that we have followed the Web 2.0 standards which highly supported by search engines. We have made alters for all images in the website and encouraged users who post any project to show all details with tags for accurate appearance in the search engines. Another important thing in this field is that our hosting provides free SEO services and tools which measure the level of optimization and suggest solutions. 17 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Social Media Requirements No one can deny the role that social media and networks can play to promote any business in current time. We mean by social media these virtual online communities like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, etc… We will employ social media to stay in touch with our users and fans, also we will use it to promote our business and keep all members attracted.  Usability and Accessibility We mean by usability is to make the website as simple and fast to navigate as possible, and presenting information in an easily readable format. For that we have used a suitable fonts and links that can be seen easily by visitors, we also build pages will less-quality images for faster loading. We have tested our system on may browsers and found that it’s compatible with most of them with its best view, we found that it’s only not fully compatible with )nternet Explorer .0 which no longer used widely as it never fully support Web 2.0 websites. One more thing we have tested our system on mobile phones and found it fully compatible with no problems, so our system can be accessed from most used devices and machines.  System Reports For internal usage, the administrator can print out some reports or just download them in document formats. These reports may contain the status of the servers, users, mailing-lists, payment requests or any admin-related concerns. 18 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 3.2 Non-Functional Requirements A non-functional requirement is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system. We have identified some of these nonfunctional requirements that must be available in our system.  Security We have considered the security issue as an essential part of our system because our system has a financial section which is the backbone of our work and thus we expect that as much as we grow the attackers will target us. One main security feature we have integrated in our system is the SQL injection which highly used by hackers, we will explain this extensively later. We also used the pre-installed tools in our hosting which make it easy to track and monitor our website against any suspicious access or attacking trials.  Availability As an online portal, availability of our website is a priority task or else no one will access our services. Even though this requirement is hosting-related and at most we have no control over it because we are not work on a private server but it still need us to be careful when choosing our webhosting. For that we have made survey on hosting providers and finally found a famous one which guarantees that servers have 99.9% uptime.  Maintainability Making our website maintainable allow us to modify it easily or solving any problem with easy steps. For that we have made our code simple and added full documentation and comments over it. 19 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Reliability In general, reliability is the ability of a system to perform and maintain its functions in routine circumstances ore in any other conditions. It will be too risky if the website is not reliable as it may make unexpected decision like converting money in illegal forms or any kind of unexpected events. For that we are trying to avoid any complexity in code or design and periodically checking our service.  Performance Website performance is a very important and huge topic; its importance comes from search engines which classify low-performance websites at bottom and the high-performance at the top. For achieving best performance we have used many free resources and websites which measure the performance of a website and suggest solutions to increase this performance. During our measurement we found that using not well styled CSS will cause a low-performance so we have modified our CSS to fit best performance. Another thing was that using JavaScript in multiple locations will cause our website to load heavily and may cause performance to get very low, so for that we have reduced the use of JavaScript in main and vital interfaces. 3.3 System Specification List of actors and their tasks: - Administrator: has full control of the system. - Businessman: Someone who searching for workers. - Freelancer: Someone who looking for a work. - Guests: Visitors has limited access to small parts of the website. 20 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 3.1 - Specifications and Details of Businessman Actor 21 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 3.2 - Specifications and Details of Freelancer Actor 22 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 2.3 - Specifications and Details of Administrator Actor 23 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Chapter 4 Database Design 4.1 Introduction As we previously mentioned, we have use Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to design our database, but before starting to design technically the database we have used Microsoft Visio 2007 to design relational modeling and diagrams. In this chapter we will introduce what we have done to build a successful database that satisfies all our needs to build a successful project. 4.2 Database Tables The table below describes briefly the purpose of main tables in the database. Table Name User Bid Category Messages Problem Exams Questions QuestionOptions Certification MailList ContactUs Reply Settings Advertisement Description Contains all information about specific member Contains information related to specific bid Contains information about jobs categories Contains all messages that transferred between users Listing problems noticed by our users and their feedbacks Examination listing, every category have specific exam Every exam has different questions Every question has different options Listing users who have earned degrees by passing exams Listing all emails that enrolled in our mailing list Messages transferred from contact us forms Admin replies to contact us messages Website settings to be activated or not The banner that appear in website can be changed Table 4.1 - List of Database Tables and their Description 24 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 4.3 Entity Relationship Diagram We did two entity relationship diagrams: one is abstract and other with details. Figure 4.1 - Abstract ER Diagram 25 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 4.2 - ER Diagram with Full Details 26 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 4.4 Relational Database Model In this section we are providing two versions of database modeling: one using Microsoft Visio 2007 which done manually and other using MS SQL Server 2008 which done automatically after building our database. Figure 4.3 - Relational Database Model using Visio 2007 27 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 4.4 - Relational Database Model using Visio 2007 28 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 4.5 - Relational Database Diagram using MS SQL Server 2008 29 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 4.6 - Relational Database Diagram using MS SQL Server 2008 Finally, we would like to say that there’re some fields available in our database we didn’t use in our website but we have added them for our future work. 30 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Chapter 5 Website Programming and Design 5.1 Introduction We have used ASP.Net with C# programming language to implement our project, there’re several reasons explain why we have used this language and we have previously listing these reasons in chapter 2. In this chapter we will show the most important details about the process of building this project, we will show pages design, procedures and functions we have used or implemented. During our implementation we have used many helper tools, also we have used MS Visual Studio 2008 Internal Wizard which helped us too much to avoid writing code manually as it generate code for any components we add or any connection we build automatically. For higher performance and easier maintenance we have split C# code of ASP.Net code, so all C# classes are written on unique file called dataaccess.cs. We have sectioned our website into 6 folders; the table below shows these folders and their description. Folder Name Admin User Interface Spaw Images Upload Description Contains complete control panel and pages of administrator Contains the complete control panel and pages of the user Contains general pages and the interface of website Contains libraries and add-on tools Contains images upload on the website Contains uploaded files by users Table 5.1 – Website Folder Names and their Description 31 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 5.2 Root Directory The root directory typically contains the homepage and directories for the main sections of the website and is accessed when a user types in a website address URL. This directory contains pages; we will show these pages briefly here…  Default.aspx This is the main page of our website and so it will be the first page to appear when anyone types our website URL in the address bar of the browser. We tried as possible to make this page attractive and contain all information that any visitor or user may need to know once he/she enters the website. We have sectioned this page into multiple sections. One of them was pure text which introduces the website and what it can do and other section which is part of the master page contains buttons linking to other interface pages of website. We have used Marquee HTML tag to create the latest projects section of the page and make text scrolling up, the HTML code below show this effect. To show latest projects we have to connect to the database and get the news, we have request latest 8 projects with max bid to be appeared once the page loaded. The code below shows this connection. 32 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Error.aspx This page will appear when any internal error occurs or any lost of connection with database. The content of this page will be a message with text Sorry there is an error .  Htmlerror.aspx This page will appear when any requested page doesn’t exist or when any user tried to change parameters of full URL in the address bar. We have made this error catching to prevent SQL injection which can be done via changing web address parameters. The content of this page will be a pure text message telling user that he/she is requesting wrong page and will be redirected to the homepage.  Search.aspx If any user wants to search for specific project, then he can enter terms in the specified search form. Once clicking search button the terms will be carried to database to check equality and return results. Code below show this connection. 33 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 5.3 Interface Pages The interface directory contains general pages and core function pages. In this section we will show these pages and their description briefly.  Register.aspx In this page visitors can register in our services. The image below showing the required fields, we have used Visual Studio internal validation object to ensure the accuracy of filled forms. Figure 5.1 - Register Page Form 34 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 5.2 - Register Page (Adding CV) We have used Ajax technology to build the text area editor for CV’s. Users are highly encouraged to provide their CV’s and so this will improve our service quality. Once the fields completely filled by the user it will connect to database and add a new record contains all provided details.  Login.aspx This page will be used for login details, users have to enter their email address and password. Once submitting details it will connect database and check if they are true or not. )f not it will give a message Incorrect login details and if true it will redirect to main page and user now is allowed to use all services like modifying profile, submitting project or bidding in any project, and etc… 35 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Bid.aspx This page will list all open projects that user can view. We have use GridView component to design the list. Once the page loaded it will connect to database to fill the GridView table with details about every project. It will show project name, business owner, and category, rate of business owner, max bid, date and time.  Postproject.aspx By accessing this page, users can submit any project to be done by freelancers or bidders. Any submitted project should have basic information like title, type, category, delivery deadline, max possible bid, and general requirements. Business owner also can upload any helper files with the project; files must be in .Zip format for security reasons. In case any user start to post any project session must be active to ensure if the user still online or just logged out, for that we have built the below session code. Once the project submitted it will added as record in the database and now can appear in Bid.aspx page listing.  Details.aspx All project details like bids, exchanged messages and attachment files will be available in this page. Business owner will be able to see all bids but bidders can see only bids that they have added. 36 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. There’re stages of any submitted project, the table below will explain this… Project Stage Description Open This means that the project still open and anyone can bid on it In progress Completed Accepted This means that someone is selected to complete the project and it’s no longer available for bidders. This means that project is completed and delivered to the business owner. This means that business owner has accepted the work and money will be transferred to freelancer account. Table 5.2 - Project Stages and Description Business owner and freelancers can exchange message in this page, and once the business owner select a specific freelancer to do the project then all other freelancers will not be able to add more messages and the page will be opened only to business owner and selected freelancer to exchange messages. We have used GridView to arrange the layout of exchanged messages; also we have added an attachment form so freelancers can upload samples of their works. We have restricted file types to .Zip extension to be standard between users and because this extension can be opened in any operating system without helper tools and can be scanned for viruses if the file is infected because running it. For this we have made the function below… 37 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Rating.aspx Once the project accepted by the business owner both the businessman and freelancer will be redirected to the rating page in which each of them will give the other side a rate of 10. We did this to guarantee higher quality of our users. The page below is from Visual Studio to show the content of this page. Figure 5.3 - Rating Page Content We are checking if the user is freelancer or businessman, if he is a freelancer then his rate form will be hided and only show the businessman rate and so on for businessman.  Recover.aspx We designed this page for password recovery, in case any user has forgotten it. Figure 5.4 - Recover Password Screen 38 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Once the user enter his email and press Recover Password button the email address will be carried to database to be compared if there are any email equal it. If yes, then it will send the password to this email and if no, it will give a text message saying that there is no user registered with this email; the code below shows this operation.  Contactus.aspx This page is built as standard available in most professional websites. Anyone have problem in our website can use this form and send message to the administrator. Once the user submit the message it will added to administrator record in database and can be accessed from his control panel and may do a quick reply as we will see later when we show the contents of administrator control panel. 39 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 5.4 User Control Panel User control panel can be accessed from My Account button in the header of the master page. It contains all information related to specific user like project bids, profile information, examinations and financial issues. We have built master page that contains multiple tabs so user can easily move from section to another. In this section we will show the main pages of user control panel.  Profile.aspx This page contains all information related to user. The user can edit and update his details; some of these details are available in the image below. Figure 5.5 - User Profile Data Once data updated it will connect to database and update the record related to this user. 40 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Exams.aspx In this page user can enroll any examination like PHP exam or Java exam and etc... All questions are multiple choices and randomly generated to avoid cheating.  Financial.aspx We currently support only PayPal. Once the user enter this page he can change his PayPal email address or just add funds to his account using PayPal. He will be redirected to PayPal secure website and from there he can deposit money in his account by sending the amount to PayPal administrator account.  MyProjects.aspx User can enter this page to check status of his projects even if he’s a businessman or freelancer. We have made 2 tabs one for freelancer and other for businessman and every page contains a combo box to list specific status of projects. Figure 5.6 - Listing Specific User Projects 41 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. The code below describes the connection we have used to list specific user projects…  Help.aspx This page used to request help from administrator by users. If any user has suggestion or question then he can send it to administrator via Help form. Figure 5.7 – Help Request Form 42 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 5.5 Admin Control Panel Most of our project time was spent in the design of admin control panel. Admin have all permissions that any registered user have, furthermore he has many other unique permissions specialized for administrator. In general administrator can control the website completely. In this section we will show only the unique permissions of administrator because all other functions are the same like user functions. We have used JavaScript to design the layout of control panel and this gives it an attractive view.  Viewbids.aspx This page will list all projects posted in the website and give administrator the ability to delete or modify any of these projects. To do this we have built the connection below. We have used stored procedures which is a piece of code written inside MS SQL Server. Stored procedure will do functions related to administrator like view, edit and delete records, it will be invoked from Visual Studio and it’s well-known that stored procedures are higher in performance than normal code written in Programming language IDE. 43 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Viewusers.aspx The same function as Viewbids.aspx but here it will list all users registered in the website with ability to view full details of their profiles.  Cvs.aspx The same function as Viewbids.aspx but here it will list all user CV’s in the website with ability to export these CV’s to MS Word Document. The code segment below shows the operation of exporting file to .doc format.  addexam.aspx To add exam, admin must first select the category of this exam then a subcategory will append to specify accurately the specialization of the exam. The image below can simply show the function of this page. We are adding )s active checkbox to make it visible to users or not. Figure 5.8 – Adding New Exam 44 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Addquestions.aspx After creating exam category, admin can now add questions to this exam by selecting the specified category and start creating multiple choice questions. We have limited choices to 6 options and not less than 2 options, for doing this we have built the code below…  Viewexams.aspx The same function as Viewbids.aspx but here it will list all exams in the website with ability to modify any of them or just delete them permanently. 45 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Bidreport.aspx This page generate a report counting number of bids with their status and number of categories in website with showing every category how many bids contain, the image below can simply describe the function of this page. Figure 5.9 – Bids Counter Report  Userreport.aspx This report will show how many people registered in the website and from which countries they are, the code below show the connection we have used to count users. 46 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Financialreport.aspx Financial report will list all users that have money in their accounts, the image below simply describe the function of this page.  Sendmailist.aspx Figure 5.10 – Sample Financial Report As we have previously mentioned any registered user can subscribe to our mailing list so he will occasionally receive e-mails about updates in the website. We have used SMTP Protocol for sending emails from our hosting, the code segment below show part of this work… 47 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Category.aspx Administrator can create new category for jobs or remove any existed category from this page, if the Main checkbox is checked then the sub-category will be hided. The image below show the interface of adding new categories in the admin control panel…  Advertisement.aspx Figure 5.11 – Adding New Category We have added banner as footer in our website, this banner could be used as advertising area for new services or just being a commercial area if any external advertisers want to advertise in our website. 48 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. The image in the banner can be changed easily from the control panel, but it must be in specific size, in our case it’s 0 x 0px , a sample banner added to our website is available in the image below…  Contactus.aspx Figure 5.12 – Sample Banner used in the Website This page will list all messages sent by users from Contact us page in the main website interface. We are giving administrator the ability to quick reply without being redirected to special page by invoking the reply page to be loaded in popup mode internally, the code segment below show this invoke…  Settings.aspx This page contains the general settings of website like admin information, SMTP, PayPal account for admin, server information and etc… 49 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Chapter 6 Website Hosting and Testing 6.1 Introduction Choosing suitable domain name and webhosting was the last technical part of our project. We have selected the temporary domain name: www.outsourcing-iug.com to be our name on the Internet, we also purchased a webhosting from famous web services provider called Mocha(ost – www.mochahost.com", this provider has very suitable prices with very good quality for his services. In next sections we will talk about our webhosting features, show the process of uploading the website to the remote hosting, showing some website live interfaces and finally testing the performance and security of our website. 6.2 Web Hosting We have made a comprehensive search before purchasing our webhosting plan from Mocha(ost , we have taken the price and the suitable quality factors as main measurements of our search. MochaHost provide multiple packages and plans for hosting, we have selected a cheap one that satisfy all our needs in this project, we may later move to a higher quality package if our project got succeeded in future. The following table show the most important features of our hosting plan. 50 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Webhosting Feature Possible number of domains can be hosted on it Monthly Traffic Disk Space Email and FTP accounts Sub-domain Support Max Number of Databases MS SQL Web Admin MS SQL Remote Management ASP.NET Frameworks Supported Max Database Size Domain Privacy Protection SSL Certifications Email Protocols Supported Package Support Status Only one domain Unlimited Traffic Unlimited Space Unlimited Accounts Unlimited Sub-domains 10 Databases Supported Not Supported Framework: 1|2|3|3.5 & 4.0 200 MB Supported Supported SMTP and POP3 Table 6.1 - Web Hosting Features Before we have moved from local PC to remote host we have take the remote host IP address to replace it with our old localhost address in the configuration file of website, the connection code below show the modifications we have did to move from localhost to remote hosting server. Data source was localhost , we changed it to the )P address of our host. Catalog is the database name. We have used MD5 encryption to encrypt our database password. These details are placed in the file web.config in the root directory. 51 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 6.1 - Webhosting Control Panel We have used FlashFXP application to upload our website from local PC to remote server. All files of the website must be transferred to the wwwroot root directory to be visible for public visitors. 52 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 6.3 Website Testing In this section we will show some general interfaces of our website then we will measure the performance with an external tool and show how we have increased it. Figure 6.2 - Website Main Interface 53 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. The second main interface is the user control panel. We have previously showed all pages in the user’s control panel in chapter . Figure 6.3 - Members Control Panel Interface 54 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. The third main interface is the user control panel. We have previously showed all pages in the admin control panel in chapter 5. Figure 6.4 - Admin Control Panel Interface Administrator control panel page is not public page, we have hid it for security reasons, and so if the admin want to access it he has to type its address manually in the browser. The link of this page is: http://www.outsourcing-iug.com/admin/ 55 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza.  Testing Performance We have tested the overall website performance using famous tool called YSlow which is an application provided from Google. Below figures show the full details of our performance test. Figure 6.5 - YSlow Performance Test 56 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Figure 6.6 - Page Speed Test 57 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. In summary we have got 82% using YSlow Performance test which is a very good result for a website still in the creation stage, also it’s appeared that all the lost percentage was in the server side that it can be modified using hosting settings in future and not from programming which got an excellent rates. Page Speed Grade was 85% which is very good result; these results also can be increased in future. Test generated by: http://www.gtmetrix.com/ Figure 6.7 - Performance Summary 58 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Chapter 7 Business Management We are introducing this chapter to estimate the chances of the project to success in case we started it in real life. The sections in this chapter will discuss several managerial topics like marketing and financial planning and so on. 7.1 Operations Management The main purpose of Operations Management is to plan, organize, direct, and control the process of bringing together people, equipment, materials, and methods. In our case we are following a business plan that have a clear development plan to stay up to date with all new technologies, it also clearly estimate financial issues and show the market analysis for our services. We are hardly trying to make all of our services run in automated mode so it will reduce time and provide a higher quality. Currently we are a limited group and so distributing roles will not be difficult, we may work on the same thing together as we have many commons and interests. We are providing one main service in this website, so our roles will be to monitor status of the website and solving any problems may occur between users or any technical problem in the website. One of the main issues we are facing is the payment method, we are trying to integrate as much as we can electronic payment methods but in this time we only integrate the PayPal payment method because it’s the only payment gateway that have a clear and easy to use API. 59 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 7.2 Development Plan Our development plan vision is to continuously upgrade services provided by our website to match the latest state of art. We are looking to build strong partnerships with most Information Technology industries and companies in the Arabic World. These partnerships can help us to increase our popularity between people especially businessmen as they feel that our services is guaranteed with high quality. Our business will extend in future and this extension requires more employees to deal with customers and respond to their wonderings. Also we may hire more web developers to improve and maintain the infrastructure of our website frequently, so it can’t be down or have any troubles. The target of our business is the Arabic world but we may expand our market in future and enter the global world, that’s completely depending on the popularity we will achieve. We may provide special memberships for freelancers, we will call it Golden Membership, and this membership is paid for a constant amount of money each month. Golden users will have more options than free users, for example they may apply for big projects but freelancers are limited to apply for projects that are not exceed $1000. We have made a survey about possible payment methods and find that CashU is the next possible payment method to be integrated in our website as it provide the same properties as PayPal and available in all Middle East countries. 60 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 7.3 Outsourcing Gateway Business Model We have summarized our business model in the figure below. In building this business model we have followed the business models standard. Figure 7.1 - Outsourcing Gateway Business Model 61 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 7.4 Market Analysis The target market of our services is those people who are interested in Information Technology field and those who have at least a minimum knowledge of how to deal with the Internet especially in Arabic world. No matters how old are they, but mostly they will be older than 18 years old and from both genders. As we previously mentioned that the world is moving toward the use of freelancers and so the business leaders in Arabic world especially in Gulf countries started to believe that using freelancers produce high quality products with lower cost than normal employees. Upon the information we have found in Middle East ICT Market Analysis report which issued by Bharat Book Bureau, India. The report expected a very big growth in the ICT market in next few years. We expect this growth will also have a positive reflection on our business. Currently, there’re two Arabic providers of our services but they have different business models which we think they need a lot of improvements. This point will encourage us to be free of competition limitation at least until other providers with the same services and better business model enter the market but we still have a competition with the traditional employment methods. Our mission is how to persuade businessmen and employers to change their direction and culture of employment toward the use of our freelancers. If we succeed in this mission there will be a very great success to our business. We expect in near future there will be new workgroups or companies provide the same services as we believe if you succeed you will face a competition but we still have advantages over them as we got more popularity in the market. 62 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. This competition will encourage us to improve our services to stay in top rank even by increasing the advertisement or providing special services that may attract more users to join our community database. 7.5 Marketing Strategy We consider that marketing is the most important step in our project because there is no success in whole project if we fail in marketing. We have studied many possible ways to promote our business and persuade businessmen, employer and freelancer to use our services. Below are these possible ways in points.  Use social networks like Facebook to advertise about our business, the most important point here is that Facebook use data mining technology in showing advertisement on profiles (i.e. it will show this advertisement continuously for people whose profiles interests are matching or related to our business). Also latest statistics showed that popular social networks have about 16% of all Internet business traffic.  Advertise in the Middle East universities between students, this will encourage them to participate and win projects to earn money.  Advertise in business newspapers. This is so important to attract business leaders and employers to use our website services.  Use popular Arabic forums which are specialized in computers and information systems to advertise about our services.  Use email newsletters to announce about our services. Also stay in touch with users by sending them latest posted projects frequently.  Use Search Engine Optimization technologies and tactics to improve the rank of our website in major search engines. 63 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. 7.6 Financial Plan Our business financial plan is created for first 3 years. We have divided the first year into months for clearer vision as we think this year is the most critical. Table below showing our expected incomes and cash flow... Figure 7.2 - Income Statement and Cash Flow Figure 7.3 - Balance Sheet at the End of Second Year 64 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Conclusion By finishing this project we have satisfied many goals, first of all we have increased our web programming skills, also we have increased our technical writing skills as we have reviewed many previous reports before starting to write this report. We think these skills will help and prepare us to access work market in future. The second thing we have achieved is to propose a new idea for our people that may help to reduce the high rates of unemployment between graduates. We also increased our business management knowledge which is a very important part in any business to get success. 65 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. References Books 1. Kirk Amant, IT Outsourcing: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications , Business Science Reference, 2009. 2. Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Scott Hanselman, Professional ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Edition: In C# and VB , Wrox Publisher, 2008. 3. R. Elmasri and S.B. Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems 5th Edition , Addison Wesley, 2006. Online  About.com, http://operationstech.about.com/od/glossary/g/Outsourcing.htm  Pinsent Masons LLP, http://www.out-law.com/page-501  Datamation.com, http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/3875026/IT-Outsourcing.htm  Freelancer.com, http://www.freelancer.com/  Virtual Worker, http://www.vworker.com/  Translatorbase.com, http://www.translatorsbase.com/  Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/  Startvbdotnet.com, http://www.startvbdotnet.com/aspsite/asp/  Browseme.com, http://browseme.info/microsoft-2008.asp  MicroTools Inc., http://www.microtoolsinc.com/Howsrs.php  1 Cog Reference, http://1cog.co.uk/usability-accessibility-web-design.html  GetMatrix.com, http://www.gtmetrix.com/  Bus. Management Club, http://www.bestbusinessinfo.com/1_4/tutorials/11401.html 66 | P a g e Outsourcing Gateway – Graduation Project Final Report, ©2011 Islamic University of Gaza. Visit Project Website…