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I. INTRODUCTION

It is hard to deny the influence of technology nowadays. People live in the era where

almost everything is automated and computerized. No one can deny that computers are

essential part of people’s lives. On this day, it is inconvenient without any computer at

home. Personal Computers are made up of software and hardware. Computer hardware

consists of the following: computer monitor, keyboard, central processing unit, mouse etc.

Software on the other hand, are any programs that enables a computer to do work. The

administrator wants to be updated in their forum every day. The client is the one who looks

at the forum to search about house and lot. They ask questions in forum instead of calling

the company about their product advertised in the internet.

Forum is an area where users share thoughts, ideas, or help by posting text

messages. Monitoring tool observes and tracks the operations and activities of users,

applications and network services on a computer or enterprise systems. The administrator

wants to be updated in their forum every day. The client who wants to look and buy a house

and lot into a forum. They ask questions in forum instead of calling the company about their

product advertised in the internet. Forum Monitoring System is a tool to listen to the

comments across internet; monitoring media not just from traditional publishers, but on

millions of social sites too.

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The Company Profile and Its background

Mortgage Station is an Australian Company that is based in Minto, New South

Wales, Australia.

The company guides the client on how to secure mortgage. It aims to make the

process of mortgage financing simple and convenient.

This Australian Company is also known as Mortgage Station, it was established to

have a free no obligation assessment service, sourcing the right loan for first home buyers,

getting the right finance structure for investors, loan refinancing (to access equity, to save

money by getting a lower interest rate, or debt consolidation) and providing freedom of

choice with over thirty lenders and hundreds of loan products from Minto, Sydney,

Australia. Since then, the company has customers range from someone purchasing a small

studio apartment to a large client buying a block of apartments and from all walks of life

they can organize mortgages for customers whether they are first home buyers or property

investors.

The company and services is to getting you the best deal this is open to all clients

and even the most complicated cases, our advisors specialize in clear communication and

straightforward advice. They will find out what they want to achieve and then make sure we

get you there. In home loan health check, this is an annual home loan health check, it is

offered for our existing clients. They can review their current status and make adjustments to

their mortgage that benefit them. Giving significant savings. Mortgage Station are producers
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and marketers of: your dream home and mortgage financing. The director of the company is

Mr. Jeremiah O’Brien.

Current Situation and Problem / Opportunity Statements

Mortgage Station is a group of mortgage broker that helps the clients to get

consultation about property inquiries on the website. The broker visits the website regularly

for them to response in every question of the client. Whoever answers the client first will be

the one to represent as the property consultant. All the answers and inquiries do not have

notifications for both client and broker. The answers will be search on the website forum to

see if the broker answered the questions that has been asked by the clients. The developer

proposed the Forum Monitoring Tool to notify the mortgage broker into the property

investment journey or to guide you among this journey purposes.

The potential client and the client look for the property chat website each and every

day. In the business of selling, the big challenge is always finding clients that are willing to

buy the products. Selling properties is more challenging, because it involves a huge financial

investment, that is why people are more careful in canvassing a lot from different sellers.

Mortgage broker acts as an intermediary who brokers mortgage loans on behalf of

individuals or businesses. As a broker it is a big advantage if you will be the first to attend

and offer your products to potential clients. This will open an opportunity for the proponent

to find ways to be able to identify first the potential clients. With the problems in the existing

system, the Mortgage Station Pty. Ltd. gave the developer an opportunity to conduct a study
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and develop a new system that will help solve the problem that the mortgage broker

encounters. The system will provide the company that can store data and generate reports

faster and secure information.

Project Scope

The scope of the study is to find ways for the brokers to find potential client that are

inquiring about purchasing a property ranging from small studio apartment to a large client

buying a block of apartments within Australia. This study will focus on its potential client

search on the most popular internet property forum in Australia.

Project Objectives

The objective of this study is to determine the possibility of developing a system that

can monitor the Internet Forum for people that are inquiring to purchase a property in

Australia.
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Importance of the study

This study will be beneficial to the following:

To the Clients. This project will help the clients to have faster response for their questions.

To the Mortgage Brokers. This project will help the mortgage broker in maximizing the Internet,

to look for potential clients which nowadays almost all people go online, to look everything

for what they need. The first one to attend to their inquiries will be given the mortgage

brokers higher chances to be selected to do business with them.

To the Developers. This study will help the developers in gaining knowledge and enhancing

their skills on how to make a software.

To the Future Developers. This study can be a baseline to further explore the Internet for other

method on how to reach for more potential clients.

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II. REVIEW OF RELATED STUDIES

LOCAL

Culture-aware Social Media Insights

Provide statistical data on the performance of marketing campaigns of companies in

social media. It can tell where your marketing campaigns are gaining traction or where

people are talking about your brand.

Social Listening

The internal structures and mechanics involved with the tools used for social

listening can be likened to the spiders and bots used by search engines that crawl web pages.

These tools crawl the accessible contents of web pages continuously, in real time, or on

certain time intervals depending on your goals and objectives.

Social listening tools search these web pages to look for specific “mentions” of specific

keywords or phrases – in this case a topic, product or brand – and will then summarize and

report them all back to you in a form where you can get relevant insights that can help your

business.

These tools vary in features, coverage and functionality and can be useful to a particular

business depending on their needs or according to what information they want the tool to

get. Most of these tools are free and many offer premium packages for business use. Paid

models can be as cheap as $10 a month, or as expensive as $50,000 depending on their

complexity and function.

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FOREIGN

Social Mention

Social media search engine that searches for keywords on social media platforms —

including blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos and microblogging services —

and provides metrics around keywords and “sentiment.” It also provides graphic illustrations

or charts showing mentions per day or week. Download the free search bar for your browser

and monitor anything from your brand to your cause.

Hootsuite

Tool that enables nonprofits and cause organizations to update multiple social media

platforms (Twitter, Facebook) from a computer or mobile device. The free version lets you

work with up to five social networks and two RSS feeds but is limited to one user for your

organization’s account; it stores stat history for 30 days and is ad supported. For the paid

version.

SYNTHESIS

Based on the review of the related studies they have some similarities on the

proposed tool in terms of the ability to monitor social media sites. This will allow the users

to know the latest trends in relation to their products and find potential clients.
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III. METHODOLOGY

This study adapted the Agile Software Development Life Cycle Model as shown
below:

Figure 1 – Agile Model

For the development of the Forum Monitoring Tool, the Agile Model is used as

shown in Figure 1.

Agile Model is a combination of iterative and incremental process which focuses on

process adaptability and customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of working software product.

Agile model believes that every project needs to be handled differently and the existing
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methods need to be tailored to best suit the project requirements. In agile the tasks are

divided to time boxes to deliver specific features for a release.

The Phases were:

1. Planning. This is the phase where the stakeholders gather requirements thru

interview and the developer plan to research for program specifications.

2. Requirements Analysis. This is the phase where the developers analyzed for

technical solutions to cater the requirements and the developer is required to visit or

to locate the website property chat to know the RSS feeds and to have an idea about

it.

3. Designing. This phase is where the designing of tool started. The developer

identified that the excel macro is best suited to develop the required tool along with

the Visual Basic Application. Utilizing the RSS feed of the forum to extract all posts

of the users.

4. Building. This phase will start when the three prior phases had been approved and

the developer built a tool for the potential client of the tool.

5. Testing. When the developers built the tool, the tool will undergo in the testing

phase.

User Acceptance Test (UAT). The developers prepared a user acceptance test to know the

feedbacks of the users and to evaluate the system. With this test, the developers can enhance

or fix the problems encountered.

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Evaluators For the user acceptance test, the target respondent of the system are the

users of forum monitoring site.

Instrument or Questionnaire The developers created a UAT questionnaire with the

following criteria:

User-Friendliness – this is the physical view or the Graphical User Interface (GUI)

of the system. It questioned on how the interfaced was designed, if the chosen color is

appropriate and pleasing to the eye of the user.

Functionality – this pertains to the functionality of the system. This aims if the

textboxes, dropdown menus and buttons works properly.

Speed and Accuracy – this pertains to the speed and accuracy on how the system

responds and if the reports are accurate and true. Please refer to the appendix C for the

UAT Questionnaire.

Table 1. Likert Scale Guide

Rating Interpretation

4.50-5.00 Very Good

3.50-4.49 Good

2.50-3.49 Neutral

1.50-2.49 Not Good

1.00-1.49 Not Very Good

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Procedures. The developers determined first the criteria needed that will serve as basis

for the User Acceptance Test. The developers took one (1) week to conduct the User

Acceptance Test since the developers need to get respondents.

Statistical Treatment of Data. For the computation of the gathered response, the

developers used Statistical Techniques by getting the mean range of variables included using

this formula:

X=  fx
N
Result of the User Acceptance Test. The overall result of the User Acceptance Test

conducted by the developers has the total of 4.4 rating which has the remark of

Good. Please refer to the Appendix C for the UAT results

Iteration Two will start after two to three months after the release of Iteration One,

depending on the feedback of the client if they have additional features or improvements

that they wish to implement. Same process will be done if Iteration Three is needed. The

two to three month timeframe between Iteration is not fixed and still depends on the client.
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Development Tools

The developer used different kinds of tools such as:

Table 2 – Hardware specification for development

Desktop/Laptop 1.7 gigahertz (GHz) 64-bit (x64) processor

Operating system Windows 10

RAM 4 gigabytes (GB)

Hard disk 1000GB

Design Tool Visual Basic Application (VBA)

Email Account Free or paid account

Internet Connections 3mbps or higher

Table 3- Software specification for development

Software Visual Basic Application (VBA)

Microsoft Excel Used Version 2010

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Project Cost

The estimated cost of this project is at Php 20,000 this is compose of developer fee

for Php 15,000 and a miscellaneous expense of Php 5,000 that includes electricity, Internet,

transportation and supplies.

Project Constraints

The project will not cover the monitoring of other Internet Forum and the actual

transaction of buying of properties.

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IV. THE PROJECT DETAILS

Project Narrative Description

A Forum Monitoring Tool will be the solution for the requirements of the client.

The Internet forum (please refer to references for source) is the most popular forum in

Australia in terms of searching for property to buy or to sell. This is one of the best place to

look for potential clients. Being the first one to answer on a post on queries about properties

will definitely give a good impression and more likely to be considered. The main challenge

is to monitor the forum constantly for new posts about properties.

The forum (please refer to references for source) have a RSS feed service which can

be used to get the newest contents of the forum. The Forum Monitoring Tool will be

developed using Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Excel Visual Basic Applications (VBA).

First, the tool must be configured to connect to the forum via RSS feed and continuously

downloading new post from the forum.

User will input all the email addresses of all intended recipients who will receive an

email message whenever the tool found a relevant post from the forum. Users will input a

list of keywords that will be monitored on every post in the forum and once the keyword is

encountered the tool will email the identified recipients to notify that there is a potential

clients inquiring in the forum. In this way the user can immediately reply on the inquiry

giving a good impression that they are always there to help. In addition to keywords, users

can also input Author name that he wants to monitor so whenever the said Author will have
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a new post the user will also be notified. Also user can input Title of the post so any post

under that Title; user will also be notified via email.

Design Issues

Internal Design

The Excel file will have six sheets. The 1st sheet named Main contains two buttons

the Start and Stop. Start button triggers the beginning of the monitoring of the tool. It

downloads all new post from the Forum every 1 minute while the Stop button will just end

the monitoring process. The 2nd sheet named Recipients will contain all the email addresses

of users that will be notified by the tool. The 3rd sheet is the Author this will contain all the

list of Authors from the forum that the user wants to monitor, whenever the said Author

posts something the user will be notified of his post. The 4th sheet is named Title, this will

contain all the keywords that will be searched on the Title of the post in the forum. The 5 th

sheet will contain all the keywords that will be searched on the Body of the post. The 6th

sheet will contain all the logs of search results. All data that the tool will process will come

from the Internet Forum via RSS feeds. The tool will search for entries based on Author,

title and body of the post. An email will be sent to intended recipients to notify that the

criteria are met.

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External Design

The tool is the Microsoft Excel file that uses a VBA macro to process all

functionality from downloading the RSS feeds, searching for keywords and sending of email

to users.

Major design constraints and limitations

The tool will never cover the actual buying and selling transaction of the property. It

will not maintain any search history nor any past posts from the Internet Forum. Keeping an

historical search or old posts will be irrelevant because the main purpose of the tool is to

respond first to the newest posts in the forum. In way the email messages sent to potential

clients will remain in the email server which is a better way of storing because of its

availability online.

Implementation Issues

Table 4. Hardware and Software Requirements

Desktop/Laptop 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64)

processor

Operating system Windows 7 recommended

RAM 1GB recommended

Hard disk 60GB recommended

Microsoft Excel Version 2000 recommended

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Email Account Free or paid account

Internet Connections 3mbps or higher

Security

The main security is a password protected windows operating system. Security on

the tool will be the standard password protected features of Microsoft Excel. And for the

sender email account the username password authentication of the email service.

Training and Maintenance

The developer will conduct a one hour training to the users. A user’s manual will be

given to the client for their reference. There will be one month warranty support and the

developer is also committed once there is a request for enhancements.

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V. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Conclusions

This tool will be used to monitor the forum for prospective clients. It is developed

using Microsoft excel macro for windows flat form personal computers. The functionalities

ranges from searching an online forum based on the author, post title and body of the post

which then send an email to the user to alert that there is a relevant post based on the

keywords provided.

Recommendations

The implementation of this tool is recommended to benefit the user to have an

advantage from competitors for findings prospective clients. Future developers may use this

study as baseline for enhancing the tool for other clients and for monitoring other forums or

multiple forums.
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APPENDIX A
PROJECT SCHEDULE
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APPENDIX B
RESEARCH TOOLS
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APPENDIX C
RESULTS OF USER ACCEPTANCE TEST
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APPENDIX E
DATA FLOW DIAGRAM / USE CASE DIAGRAM WITH USE CASE TABLES
AND ACTIVITY DIAGRAM
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APPENDIX G
SAMPLE SCREEN SHOTS
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APPENDIX H
H-DIAGRAM
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APPENDIX I
PROGRAM SPECIFICATION (PROGRAM FLOWCHART)
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APPENDIX J
PROGRAM LISTINGS
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APPENDIX K
SYSTEM ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
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APPENDIX L
ABOUT THE DEVELOPER
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REFERENCES