Cloud Learning Platform Education

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

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

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Manufacturing Intranet Portal

Modernization of critical SharePoint based enterprise software platform for improved employee productivity and collaboration

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A large candy manufacturer from the United States relies on SharePoint for its employee collaboration initiatives. The purpose of this portal is to inform, train and educate employees. Being a business that creates high volume, creative products for children, the company relies heavily on new ideas and innovation fostered from within its employee and partner base to consistently bring new products to the market and stay a step ahead of competition. The SharePoint-based intranet portal was called New Product Initiative, or NPI. NPI allowed the employees to put up ideas for new products, which then went through various feasibility studies and approval cycles that involved other corporate teams including product, manufacturing, marketing and finance. While the company had a process for this communication, the adoption of the current portal by employees fell short of company’s expectations due to rigid legacy architecture and lack of streamlined process and automation. Lack of optimum integration points, performance issues and a subpar user experience caused inefficient usage and hurdles in collaboration between teams.

The Vatsa Solution: Improving performance and user experience of SharePoint based system

The company’s management wanted to modernize this business-critical application and approached Vatsa to perform a due diligence. The due diligence process surfaced key insights and bottlenecks related to the usability of the portal and workflows. It was decided that using the Microsoft environment was the most optimum because it utilized the existing infrastructure, had a great price-to-performance ratio and provided a robust roadmap with strong integrations for future enhancements. Vatsa used SharePoint designer and improved the overall portal experience by creating a new look and feel. As an important step and to address the key insights that had surfaced, Vatsa also redesigned the site navigation and user experience to introduce layers of activity that aligned with organizational goals and the innovation process, and created workflows for data collection and information validation that drove the product ideation process. These workflows provided review points and designated approval hierarchies as forms and other documents that traced an idea seamlessly from the beginning to its logical conclusion. Superior user experience, and seamless workflows with appropriate roles, alerts and reminders were the key highlights of the transformational improvements that Vatsa brought to the engagement.

Results:

The company has been in manufacturing business for nearly 100 years. With increasing pace of business and rising competition, introducing new product ideas continuously was identified as a critical differentiator for the company. Vatsa brought its full-stack expertise on Microsoft technologies to transform the existing portals and business processes with superior performance and user experience. This resulted in:

1) Vastly improved ideation process powered by automated workflows and seamless interworking of all SharePoint and NPI components
2) An order of magnitude improvement in employee adoption and usage of the new NPI system, with it becoming the primary source of communication for the entire innovation process
3) Adoption of NPI by the core product team for its own internal usage and innovation in addition to new ideas coming from employees at large, resulting in dramatically increased productivity of staff across the board
4) A robust system that is a durable competitive differentiator and core competency that is hard to replicate for others in the industry

Technology and Tools:

SharePoint Designer, SharePoint InfoPath Designer

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