TCENet - Best Innovative Project of the year 2007 by PCQuest

I got a call from Shalinie mam from Thiagarajar College of Engineering on June 6th, 2007 in which she intimated me about "The Best Innovative Project award for the year 2007" which was given to TCENet (which was my final year project in college) by PCQuest a leading IT magazine. I just floated in air for sometime as soon as I heard it. Some four months back mam was telling me that TCENet was nominated for PCQuest's Best IT implementation award for the year 2007 along with some 250 great industry standard projects. At that time after seeing the projects which were nominated (http://forums.pcquest.com/itimplementation/nominations2007.html)along with TCENet I thought it was going to be a tough competition. But TCENet made its way far ahead and was selected as one of the most innovative project of the year 2007. It makes me and the entire TCENet team to feel proud about the work which we had did. It all started some 2 years back in the month of April, 2005. We (Ranjani and myself) had a long discussion with Shalinie mam regarding the migration of TCENet to a complete FOSS based solution which was there in our plans for a long time and a lot of technical discussions were made with Joe Steeve long before that with the feasibility of this effort. Mam asked us to take this up as our final year project, though we had a greater passion towards GOATEE to take it up since we had planned long time ago to do some core systems programming code and we also thought that it will be a continuation of AAOSK. Mam convinced us to take TCENet as our final year project and after a little bit of initial hesitation we agreed. Then we had long discussions internally with the college management regarding the requirements and with Joe Steeve regarding the technical design goals of the project, etc, etc. I need to admit here that it was the complete effort of Joe Steeve which made this huge FOSS based TCENet possible. Though we had lot of discussions, professional document preparation right from the month of April 2005 regarding this new effort, the official mailing list for TCENet rolled out in the month of September, 2005 (https://lists.tce.edu/pipermail/tcenet/2005-September/000001.html) and I feel proud to be the first person to mail in that list :) Then a lot of learning has happened and we had a lot of discussions in the mailing list, which helped us to gain a lot. This gain is not only in the technical end, but also on different ends such as project management, organizing, marketing, people management, professional manners, etc. I take this as an opportunity to thank my guide both in life and project Dr. Mercy Shalinie who have given me this opportunity and "Freedom" to come up with this great piece of successful work. I will always tell mam that TCENet is no more a project, it is a culture in TCE and students must feel great and proud to be a part of this culture, but in order to be a part we need to have a lot of sacrifices. The first thing in this culture is to think PP Lab as your first home :) To put it simply, I was mad about TCENet for the plain reason that I wanted to gain knowledge and achieve something in life. I can proudly say today that TCENet is a milestone in my career and life. After the announcement about the "The Best Innovative Project of the year 2007" for TCENet came in PCQuest, there was a lot of press coverage both in local tamil news dailies like Dinamalar and in the Hindu (http://www.hindu.com/2007/06/14/stories/2007061455320200.htm). I got a lot of calls from my relations saying that the news about your project TCENet has come in dinamalar. This was the real happiness I got, because whoever I meet I will talk about TCENet, since I am living with TCENet syndrome for the past 4 years :) Other happiest thing was that which happened day before yesterday ie., Friday (15-06-2007), when I met Dr. V. Abhai Kumar, Principal TCE at Bangalore railway station as a pleasant surprise, which I was longing to get an opportunity to share this happiness with him. He congratulated me for getting this award for TCENet and that was a greatest thing for me :) All done well and I hope to see a lot of innovations as a part of TCENet and lot of juniors to take interest in the project to build this culture. Once again thank you mam. Thank you Joe. Thank you Ranjani for introducing me to TCENet in my second year :) And thanks a lot to all my seniors and juniors who are a part of this culture. Thank You Saravanan who is one of my project mates in this project! Hats off to you team!

Pics available on request!