Product Development and Maintenance

Education Sector

This client was a new ‘start-up’ company based in the US focusing on development of a secure web portal product for school communities. The web based product concept was to involve the students, their parents, teachers, administrators and any other stakeholders such as the School Advisory Board and school clubs or sports teams, in a holistic environment. The client was looking to launch this product to coincide with start of the very next School Year. They also wanted to then continue to be able to continually develop and release new enhancements and features on a frequent and regular basis.

Ekomate has now been the IT development partner for this client for more than a year. Technical specifications are provided by the client, and then the Ekomate software developers work in daily communication by skype and email with the clients Product manager, based in California. The codes (developed on ASP.NET/C#) are uploaded to the clients systems on a daily basis, and a QA/QC review is then completed.

The next day tasks are assigned for the development team, usually now these are on a weekly and a daily basis due to the continually changing and developing requirements,. Following this process, which is our Rapid Model of Development, the client has been able to deploy their products in time for this same school year; also they have continued to be able to add more new schools as clients.

Ekomate resource teams are also now continuously working with the client towards bringing out new product enhancements and features, for example in addition to the basics such as all school bulletins and school/teacher to parent communications and lunch menus etc., the system can now also provide all of the different course and homework details and links to required resources. Plus the students and their parents can monitor their progress and grades with regular reports and easy direct communication. All in a totally secure environment.

In summary by working with Ekomate, this ‘start-up’ company has been able to outsource a significant part of its software engineering and development requirements, thereby minimizing its cost and they have been able to launch quickly and competitively to take a new business opportunity.The continuing elimination of the costs of paper, printing, envelopes and above all the time savings by their school customers has made the product and the company a great success.