Panel¶

This page gives an overview of Panel, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.

Service Description¶

Panel provides a discussion system for graduate funding, allowing departments to identify candidates for admissions, funding and supervision to assess their potential and select those more suitable.

Service Status¶

Panel is currently live.

Currently there is no planned roadmap for the future of this service; however, the service is widely used to support departments with the graduate Applications and there are regular updates made to the business logic.

Contact¶

Technical queries and support should be directed to uis-cloud@lists.cam.ac.uk and will be directed to Martin Hunt, who is the member of the team who works on the service.

Environments and Client¶

Panel has the following component:

A web client used by departments to score and assess applicants in the system and to administer their users/applicants etc.

Web¶

Authentication is global and partially governed through Raven. Raven protected sections are under the URL Raven/. Panel has a database with approved users. Environment is decided by URL as listed below.

The Panel web app is currently deployed to the following web environments:

Name	URL	IIS Servers
Production	https://panel.admin.cam.ac.uk/	Dreamer/Executive
Staging	https://uatPanel.admin.cam.ac.uk/	Dreamer/Executive
Development	localhost	localhost

Source code¶

The source code for the Panel can be found at the following URL:

https://dev.azure.com/meh37/panel

The code is spread over the following repositories:

Repository	Description
BEL	Holds business objects
BPL	Holds business processes; knits together BEL and DAL
BuildProcessTemplates (Deprecated)	Not currently used
ConsolePullDocuments	Used by Computer Lab, this pulls the CamSIS documents into one downloadable zip file they can source
DAL	Data access routines, for example a library to communicate by SQL server
Database (Deprecated)	No longer used as requires a subscription from Redgate - use SQL instead
Documents	A library that can hold documentation
EDMSTestingApp	A testing application for EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) - this is a bespoke library that accesses data related to applicants
FormsTestApp (Deprecated)	Deprecated project for an unused windows forms application
packages	Holds the NuGet packages for the project
SQL	Holds SQL change scripts
TestConsole (Deprecated)	Deprecated library that holds console app for testing
UnitTests	Unit tests around Panel
Website	Holds source code for the website

Technologies used¶

The following gives an overview of the technologies Panel is built on.

Category	Language	Framework(s)
Database Server	MS SQL	SQL Server 2019
Web Code	VB.NET	4.6.1

Operations¶

How and where Panel is deployed¶

Web¶

It is important to note that this application does not use docker, rather it is directly installed on the server.

Server	OS	IIS version
Dreamer	Windows Server 2012 R2	8.0
Executive	Windows Server 2012 R2	8.0

The websites are set up locally on the E drive on those machines. To keep files in sync a DFS share has been set up between the two servers that can be accessed here:

\\internal\support\IIS_Data

Deploying a new release¶

Web deployment is done through Visual Studio. Profiles have been set up to copy the web files and can be deployed through a right click publish. UIS Windows Server Team are responsible for monitoring the underlying machines.

Admin app deployment is done through copying files to the file server location.

Service Management¶

The Team responsible for this service is Lovelace Team.

The Tech Lead for this service is meh37.

The Service Owner for this service is TBC.

The Service Manager for this service is TBC.

The Product Manager for this service is TBC.