vteam #334 was hired to work on the SmartSIS application system. It is an inquiry management solution that manages the inquiries coming from variety of sources, including website inquiry form, external marketing websites and inquiry providers. It was designed and developed for Living Arts College. Major modules include:
- Manage Inquiries
- Manage Contacts
- Calendar Appointments
- Email Templates
- Import and Export Processes
The system is developed using C#, ASP.NET MVC 4, SQL Server 2008, Windows Services, REST Services, Entity Framework and Telerik Controls. Living Arts staff conducts a series of interviews from candidates during the admission process. They have different interview types like Phone Interview for international students, campus interview for local US students, Financial Planning interview related to financial matters etc.
The Challenge:
The staff at the client’s facility was using two disconnected desktop based applications to manage the process of tracking leads and managing interviews. Since both systems were disconnected, the users were constantly double entering data both ways to keep the two apps synchronized.
Implementation of a new solution:
The solution was implemented in two phases and details related to first phase are mentioned here in which “scheduling application” is replaced with a “Calendar module” developed as part of SmartSIS system using an open source jQuery plugin “fullcalendar”. The second phase was replacing “lead application” with an “Inquiry module” also developed as part of SmartSIS and thus replacing two different applications with a single solution on web.
In first phase, Farrukh Hameed developed the Calendar module and integrated with “lead application” so that when Living Arts staff updates the candidate status in lead application, the updates are also reflected at Calendar module in the form of new appointment and task creation.
He also made following customizations as required in the project:
- Added custom event types views like appointment, task and myevents.
- Integrate third party developed resource view with fullcalendar.
- Added different color for the events based upon event status
- Integrated qTip tooltip plugin to show event details on mouse over the event.
- Implemented fullcalendar plugin.
Conclusion:
SmartSIS calendar module provides the functionality to define staff working times, off times, tasks and appointments. Calendar module provides all standard scheduling functionality like month view, week view, day view and resource view. It also sends appointment reminder emails to staff so that Living Arts staff should remain well informed with upcoming interviews on time. After implementing Calendar module there is significant performance improvement at Living Arts sales department as staff are well informed with their tasks and upcoming appointments.
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