Softwire have performed a number of projects for the English Language Teaching group within Cambridge University Press (CUP). These involved the initial development and subsequent enhancement of a Flash-based CD-ROM delivery platform for the interactive CD-ROMs that accompany many of CUP’s English Language Teaching course books.
The original project was for a series of four interactive CD-ROMs to accompany the face2face students’ books. As part of the initial consultancy phase, Softwire identified that it would be more cost effective to create a generic solution based around a single data-driven CD-ROM application plus a Content Management System to administer and publish the CD-ROM contents, instead of developing each interactive CD-ROM as a separate, standalone project.
This indeed proved to be the case, and the resulting time saving allowed the development of additional features within the project budget which helped the face2face Elementary CD-ROM win a prestigious award for CUP.
Subsequently, the original face2face platform has been extended and enhanced for other CUP publications including Objective IELTS, English in Mind and Essential Grammar in Use. All of these projects have benefited from the fact that the original feature-set supported by face2face comes essentially ‘for free’ as it can be re-used with the new content without requiring any additional software development effort, thereby providing extremely good value for money for CUP.
On a technical level the interactive CD-ROM application is built using Flash and exposes a clear and intuitive user interface – this being a key requirement as the intended user base, by definition, speak only basic English. The Content Management System is web-based and built using ASP.NET with a backend SQL Server database. This is hosted directly by CUP and supported by Softwire on an ongoing basis.
