Alex's IBM Corporate Service Corps (CSC) Experience: CSC Week 3 (June4-10)

This week, we had 2 major things to accomplish. One was to provide additional and comprehensive training to the IE members for the short term solution and simultaneously continue to build the long term solution.

For the short term solution, we created detailed training documents for the IE employees. We had several conference meetings (since some were in other cities around Brazil), and they loved the new way of doing their student/company data management. It was a great feeling when they thanked us very much for saving them so much of their valuable time. They could now use that time saved to work on much more important items revolving around the student programs.

For the long term solution, we made good head way in creating the high level architecture of the online database website. Since the solution had to be low cost, we had to think about what would be open source and free software. We ended up deciding that PHP and mySQL were the best options for database management websites, since they are free. The other item was to decide on a web hosting site that could meet the design needs and also be low cost. We suggested justhost.com as the best option for them. We will need to finalize the over all high level design by early next week to have enough time to prepare for all the final presentations.

For the weekend, we decided to go back to Porto de Galinhas. Again, this was a blast. The highlight of the weekend was going on an all day buggy ride with our driver, Leo. We had meet him briefly the first weekend we were in Porto. He took us on an excursion to private beaches where there was no other soul in sight, to a local island called Barra de Sirinhaém (Where we had the best home cooked meal ever!), and also went to see a giant African Balboa tree at the top of a hill for sunset!