State Education Management System Redesign and Functional Upgrade

Relying on their experience in building custom e-learning solutions, Iflexion got engaged into the full-cycle education management system development. The team was tasked with the system’s architecture redesign, which allowed differentiating three major functional components:

• Public site is available to all internet users. The site contains general information about the education management system, as well as news, upcoming events, photo galleries belonging to particular schools, etc. The site also serves as an examination portal to store and manage information about students who take up the state exams.
• Private site represents a password-protected area with role-based access for school principals and government officials to manage schools and students.
• Desktop application is a digital imaging tool for processing students’ photos and fingerprints.

Overall, the new education management system fosters the following domains:

• School management – the system handles a wide range of school management activities enabling users to take control of schools’ operations, assets, and staff.
• Student management – the system contains dedicated features for classifying, structuring, and managing administrative student records, as well as controlling students’ performance (grades, achievements, remarks, etc.).
• Reporting – the system provides a set of built-in reporting features to help school principals create clear-cut reports covering various aspects of their schools’ performance.
• Digital imaging – the solution includes a custom-made application that allows for processing and storing students’ and school staff’s photos and fingerprints.
• Payments balance tracking – the system supports essential accounting functions, including Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable.

The education management system redesign also allowed Iflexion to ensure several critical aspects from the software management standpoint:

• Activity history tracking – the system accumulates and displays information about changes made within different components. Thus, system administrators can always check up who and when made a particular change.
• Security – the solution ensures password-based access for internal and external users who can perform particular actions depending on their roles. To get management-level permissions, default users have to receive the approval of privileged users.
• System flexibility – workflows, permissions, user roles, and other system parameters can be configured in line with a school’s internal structure and requirements.
• System scalability – the system can be scaled up to embrace the growing number of users and ensure trouble-free school management processes. Within the tested period, the solution enabled thousands of users to work simultaneously, as well as allowed for managing over 2 million students’ profiles.

Iflexion’s team consisted of four .NET developers, a project manager, a business analyst and a test engineer. The testing specialist joined the project from the very beginning and helped the Customer reveal flaws in the initial solution. Testing results allowed the business analyst and the development team to make up a detailed plan of the solution’s functional improvement.

The project was split into several iterations. The Customer tried out each intermediate version of the education management system to collect end users’ feedback and update project requirements based on user experience.