Overview

Nagarro developed an alumni management and participation system using the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to help a Germany based provider of University Management solutions. The configurable and highly extensible system will be licensed to universities and other educational institutions worldwide, for use by their alumni.

Problem Description

The client currently offers a number of educational solutions for universities via its existing product suite. They wanted to create a generalized alumni participation system, which would become a part of their product portfolio as well. This system needed to provide a core set of functionality, be highly configurable so that it could be tailored to meet the requirements of a number of their clients, be scalable enough to support thousands of users for each implementation and be easy to deploy so that it could be implemented in days rather than weeks or months. The application also needed to integrate with their existing product offerings, as well as integrate with popular back end systems, including Microsoft Dynamics and SAP that are commonly used by educational institutions. 

Solution

Nagarro’s engineers worked with the client’s team to choose the right technology strategy, and developed the alumni portal using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 technologies. Our team was responsible for design, development, and deployment for the solution based on MOSS 2007 using Asp.Net, C#, and a large number of custom web parts. The application was designed to be scalable across server farms to ensure acceptable performance for large numbers of concurrent users.

Some of the features of the application include:

• A large selection of custom web parts allowing extensive personalization.
• Public portal functionality for users – the actual portal is hosted on public domain, and communicates with the university applications and data bases through the firewalls.
• Complex content search with the ability to search across multiple installations.
• Sub sites and site collections with individually customized templates and roles.
• Full localization support.
• Data privacy rules support that applies across all data views (searches, lists, etc.)
• Integration with Dynamics CRM web services to pull users and campaign data.
• Licensing mechanism to restrict access to functionality.

Benefits

• Ability to release the product in a timely manner, providing market leadership in this space
• Quick access to a team of dedicated and experienced SharePoint developers with proven superior project management practices
• Lowered development costs and increased ROI as a result of distributed development provided by Nagarro
• Superior knowledge management practices allowed for quick updates and enhancements