Advancing an Educational Portal to Increase Its Competitiveness

Customer

The Customer is a US-based company that provides training for managed service providers (MSPs). Working on B2B model, the company brings in expertise in the field of managed services and shares key practices to help MSPs achieve success.

Challenge

The Customer delivers educational services to end users through a WordPress-based portal and native mobile apps on iOS and Android. The previous web and mobile versions of the training system needed a substantial revamp and the introduction of new features to allow the Customer to successfully compete in their market segment. The portal’s functionality used 80+ different plugins, and the majority of them needed updating.

The Customer was looking for a partner to continue the development of the web portal and the apps, integrate them with the company’s other services and fix bugs.

Solution

ScienceSoft was selected as a service provider to carry out this project. After 8 months of cooperation with the Customer, the team of 3 developers - PHP, iOS and Android - succeeded in bringing to life a range of the Customer’s ideas.

Initially, to improve the overall performance of the Customer’s learning management system, ScienceSoft updated the previous version of the Sensei-based educational system and integrated it with WooCommerce.

Then we implemented a self-registration page enabling the portal’s new users to sign up without any assistance of the Customer’s managers and quickly get access to relevant training materials.

After that, our team integrated the Customer’s portal with MailChimp, an online email marketing solution allowing to manage subscribers, send emails and track mail-out results. Once integrated with the service, the portal automatically adds users to relevant lists based on the information collected during the user registration and thus facilitates emailing, excluding manual input of the respective data.

In addition, ScienceSoft carried out the portal’s integration with the online billing software Chargify allowing automatic account creation for the portal’s new users. Apart from the automatic billing, the service sends notifications to the Customer’s managers about the expired accounts and delayed payments.

At the next stage, the integration with Stream API was performed to guarantee the smooth tracking of every user’s activity (including changes in credentials and settings) and provide a visual representation of the accumulated information via colorful graphs and diagrams. Using this feature, the Customer can track and analyze how the portal’s users treat their content and functionality.

The Customer’s analytical capabilities were further reinforced with the portal’s integration with Wistia, which let them automatically gather statistics on user’s interactions with the Customer’s video content. Now analyzing what parts of videos are often viewed or, vice versa, skipped, the Customer can improve the content’s quality according to the users’ needs.

Our team has also redesigned the Customer’s mobile apps based on both iOS and Android and integrated them with the portal. Unlike with the previous static-page apps, the users of the new mobile version can search and download different types of content, listen to audio directly from the app and watch video after redirection to the web version.

Apart from the mentioned major tasks, ScienceSoft effected numerous minor improvements in the portal’s performance, such as:

• revealing weaknesses and properly fixing bugs in the portal’s web version
• implementing a new web chat to ensure better real-time communication with users
• updating plugins to enhance the display of lessons and podcasts and the portal’s performance
• introducing a new search engine to manage questions of the portal’s users, supporting filtering by the user, company and question, as well as the options of tracking and assigning questions to particular managers

Results

The services provided by ScienceSoft’s team met all the Customer’s requirements. The educational portal got a range of major improvements, including integration with emailing and billing services and the Customer’s mobile apps. The revamped portal enhanced the management of user accounts along with content display and provided deeper insights into the user behavior with the access to advanced statistics and data representation.

Technologies and Tools

PHP 5.4, WordPress, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, MySQL, Chargify API, MailChimp API, REST, iOS, Android.