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Description
The thesis project was developed for Playdom Inc. (Disney Interactive Media Group) to assist in the cost calculation associated with the company resources, mainly the computer servers used by the various teams in the company for their respective games. The process was regularly a manual process, involving multiple spreadsheets and a single employee who manually calculated the costs and created reports that could be sent to the accounting team for processing. This resulted in a lot of time consumption which could otherwise be used for more productive work. The proposed application tool was intended to simplify the complex method of manual calculation and develop a tool which automatically generated reports of the server details instead. It also allows active user interaction so that any updates could be easily made by the authorized users. The tool creates and maintains a database that is a structured compilation of data from the various spreadsheets available, by using a CSV (comma separated value) file which on submit would retrieve the data from the back end and insert in onto the UI page depending on the initiated query. The database is required to contain all of the data that is necessary to gauge the status of a given project/game at any given instant. The data available to view, add or update is defined according to the role of the user involved. There are customized tools available on the application to list contents of a particular table, add or delete values to name a few. The tool is currently live and is actively being used by the Studio Engineering team of Playdom Inc. at the Palo Alto site to maintain server details.
