ICT role in 21st century education and it's challenges.
Customizing Sugar for Higher Education Admissions
1. Customizing Sugar for Higher Education Admissions Paul Kavanagh, VP TechnologyJenny Zyak, Dir. Operations ColloquyApril 5th, 2011
2. Colloquy Business Colloquy is a global higher education services company owned by Kaplan ($5B public company WPO). Kaplan/Washington Post We recruit and teach students in programs offered with partner institutions that have growth potential and good reputation. We leverage our experience and reputation as a global provider of highly scalable online education systems, customizing for brand, process, scales of operation, and location. Our support removes partner costs and risks: hardware, licensing, data storage, and staffing. 2
3. Selection of SugarCRM Kaplan uses several CRMs including Orion (homegrown), CampusVue, and salesforce.com. Colloquy selected Sugar in December 2008 because of references for similar work, price/performance, the LAMP/WIMP technology stack, and time to market, which was critical for this new business. We went live in February 2009. Started with Sugar 5.2, now moving to 6.1. We use Professional, for reports, workflow, support… We use the Outlook add-in and have experimented with mobile. We fundamentally use Sugar for lead management, although this employs several support modules.
4. How We Use SugarCRM Contact Center Operations: AdmissionsStudent Success Integration with InContactClick to dialInbound school/campaign screen popCall monitoringRecognition of available advisors Reporting:Sugar reports: user friendly, quick to generateJaspersoft: for complexity e.g. integrating data from InContact, Alfresco, Moodle, etc.
5. Use Cases Admissions:Call leadsand schedule conversations and interviewsEmail campaigns using planned contact strategyCollect, review, and report on admissions documentsStudent profile used to direct conversation Student Success:Case managementIntegration with Moodle data: LDA, gradesCase creation based on Moodle dataAdvisor information on Moodle screen
6. Custom Applications Lead import and assignment: Sugar web services Apply (student and university): Sugar database and UI integrationAlfresco web servicesWeb front end Student Information System:Manages long-term dataInterchanges data with client universities Links to other applications:Sugar portal
23. Data Center Operations Tier 4 data centers Redundant everything Load balanced IIS/Apache servers SQL Server clustering, MySQL replication Disaster recovery/staging sites 7x24 help desk for students, faculty Monitoring; web sites, databases, file storage, ... 3
24. SugarCRM Customizations: Lessons Learned Commercial and open-source software package customizations should lead with defining and capturing business process flows. The operational business unit, in collaboration with the information technology department, should draft these process flows. The importance and value of process flows are well understood, but in practice this important step is short-changed or often ignored all together. As a SugarCRM developer, truly spend the time to learn and understand the software development lifecycle of SugarCRM customizations. Just don’t hack away on customizations because you are a decent PHP developer. Create development, staging and production SugarCRM environments. This will establish proper SDLC systems and controls, but also provide valuable experience with deploying customizations. The deployment of code customizations is somewhat challenging for developers new to SugarCRM to fully understand. With practical experience, deployments of customizations can be mastered. Enforce a release management strategy. For example, disable Studio on production and update the production with SQL scripts. It is important to automate releases with tools like Phing.
25. Assessment Over two years in operation nowInnovation award from Kaplan Ventures in 2010Very fast time to market, low initial costIntegrates well with other systems using web services, SQL, portal Five schools, multiple programsMore on way; now expanding to Asia-Pacific (Singapore) Transitioning from Fort Lauderdale call center only to virtual centerBeginning with US work from home, then Australia, no limits… Customization needs care – see separate slideIt is a complicated system, and the user-oriented features (Studio) can create some surprising code
25 licenses, tracking over 50,000 applicantsOrion (August plan) was not ready for Feb – or even the following year
Rely on Sugar data for all admissions reporting
Alfresco data
Establish a module-based bug fix strategy. It’s enticing to group bug fixes that span across multiple modules under a single release. However, if the deployment needs to be rolled back, the entire stack of bug fixes may be inadvertently recalled as well. It is more prudent to release often with isolated module-based rereleases.
Enabler for business. Customizations to improve staff productivity and qualityConsidering for Hesser (new lower-price brand in Northeast)
