Education Modernization

Modernizing a Management Information System for Schools and Colleges

A London-based school MIS (management information system) and student performance track-ing device provider wants to enhance their current functionalities. The company caters to schools and colleges, and as part of their solution capability improvement plan, they want to add and enhance modules including Administration, Student Registration, and Student Attendance. Furthermore, they want to make some enhancements in their core product framework to make it future-proof and extensible. The management also wants to offer these MIS modules as independent products in addition to as a suite of applications. To do that, they need a trusted technology partner who can bring a strong experience of product engineering and Microsoft expertise for the architectural changes that would be required.

The Vatsa Solution: Modernizing a Management Information System for schools and colleges

Vatsa Solutions did the initial due diligence and prepared a plan for making changes in the existing MIS modules. Vatsa defined the scope, priorities, and roadmap, and did end-to-end product rearchitecting and development. The transformation of the older system required understanding the business impact of the architectural changes and aligning the changes with industry practices and end-user behavior. As part of the solution, Vatsa brought strong technical expertise to build state-of-the-art soft-ware solution for the education industry. With strong product engineering and Microsoft exper-tise, Vatsa rearchitected the existing Assessment, Registration and Attendance modules. With the new and user-friendly interface, schools were able to analyze, track and follow their pupil’s performance closely. Also, Vatsa improved the registration and attendance modules and made
them much simpler and faster. The administration staff had real-time visibility into the morning and evening attendance registers. Further, based on this experience, Vatsa also built newer modules, including Reports, and Parent Portal. The Reporting module of the system was integrated into the MIS solution and pre-de-signed into each section of the system for more flexibility. Every report within the system could be scheduled to run automatically and be sent over email or were available at login.

The Parent Portal module provided parents with real-time visibility into their child’s perfor-mance and communication with the school.Vatsa also rearchitected the product’s core architectural framework that was initially designed by the client to make it extensible and future-proof. One of the key challenges was to under-stand the data structure complexity and user experience. Each small change in the data struc-ture of one module had a larger impact on the entire suite. Vatsa’s Solution Architects worked
diligently and made multiple careful modifications to the data structure and entity relation-ships without breaking the integrity of the system. A testing team drafted test cases that sup-ported these changes and ensured full coverage of code and workflows across its multiple components. The planned activity ended with the delivery of a fully operational and optimized system without issues.

Results:

The complex and delicate nature of the implementation was supported by the technologi-cal expertise and commitment from Vatsa’s team, and the company has become a trusted partner for the customer. The engagement has lasted a long time, and Vatsa continues to develop and improve the various MIS modules and make enhancements. This has resulted in a lot of benefit for the client, including:

Intuitive, user-friendly interface to ana-lyze and track pupil’s performance
Improved flexibility to the customer with a full suite of MIS modules that can also be offered independently to schools and colleges
A modern, cutting-edge system that can quickly accommodate current and future customer requirements
The client’s management could focus on continuous improvement of the product based on customer feedback, which has led to a large and happy customer base for the company

Technology and Tools:

Microsoft .Net, C#, SQL 2008 R2, MVC architecture

Learn how you can achieve similar results for your business.

Cloud Learning Platform Education

Award-winning Learning Platform Built on top of Microsoft Office 365

Download Casestudy

A social enterprise headquartered in the UK is on a mission of enhancing teaching and learning experience with technology. As part of this mission,the company wants to build an intuitive learning and collaborative platform which can be accessed from anywhereanytime.The company wants to build key capabilities such as unlimited storage, multiple collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) and communication tools (email, calendar, email and voice conferencing) into their platform.

The Vatsa Solution: UI-Rich and Collaborative Learning Platform Over Simple SharePoint Interface

Vatsa worked closely with the company’s team to buildlearning collaboration platform that got recognition in various countries. The platform developed by Vatsa used existing learning content from SharePoint to completely transform the UI and create a full-featured Learning Management System. The user interface was built on MVC 4.5 and used AngularJS, NodeJS and other latest technologies to completely hide the SharePoint presentation layer and use it as the core database and repository. The platform is now available as a downloadable product from the Microsoft app store andhas received multiple accolades and awards.

Vatsa was a key partner with end-to-end planning, designing, implementation and platform maintenance responsibility.The company circumvented many challenges in utilizing the existing SharePoint APIs and framework beyond its structure and limitations to create a widely useful LMS for enterprises that use Microsoft technologies. The end customers could deploy an LMS for their students and teachers without having to migrate data or duplicate existing resources butinstead having a common repository in their IT infrastructure. The tool fully leveraged their Office 365 and SharePoint API and infrastructure to build a completely fresh and powerful use-case with:

1) Personalized and customized learning experience for students and teachers with adequate control and flexibility
2) Collaborative learning platform capabilities for students
3) Anywhere, anytime access to the platform
4) More power to teachers with quick and easy user provisioning, teaching and evaluation
5) Information on fingertips with notification capability for all stakeholders

Vatsa worked very closely with Microsoft on critical parts of the project that involved utilizing advanced capabilities and APIs of Office 365 and SharePoint andfinding and recommending feasible workarounds.

Platform Architecture

Results:

Vatsa brought end-to-end Microsoft stack expertise to the table which was the most important need of the project. Vatsa also worked as a key stakeholder with the company and with Microsoft to create a path-breaking product that yielded many benefits including:

1) Faster product launch and continuous enhancement of the product
2) Quick scaling to other regionsaround the globe with SaaS model poweredby cloud-native capability
3) The company founders and leadership team could bring their education domain expertise and improve product usability with continuous feedback from users
4) The company could achieve global recognition and awards due to strong support on the technology front from Vatsa

Technology and Tools:

ASP.Net, MVC 4.5 , C#, SQL 2014 R2, AngularJS, NodeJS, Grunt, Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing, O365, Advanced SharePoint capabilities and integration, HTML 5, CSS3, Bootstrap

Learn how you can achieve similar results for your business.