Business Goals
Our client is a reputed public research university in the UK. As a leading international university with campuses in 3 different countries, they offer a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate programs in various fields, including science, engineering, business, design, and social sciences. The university has a diverse student community, with students from over 150 countries. They are committed to providing a high-quality student experience. It offers various services and facilities to support its students, including a library, accommodation, student support services, sports facilities, and more.
The university aimed to enhance the complete student lifecycle: from attracting talent, onboarding recruits, day-to-day support, exams and assessments to graduation and alumni communities. Their strategy was to develop an integrated system to provide a comprehensive view of the student journey, including academic performance, accommodation, finance, and other relevant information.
Technological Challenges
Given the volume of courses offered by the university and the number of students enrolled, they were using various off-the-shelf software customised to their needs, in-house developed legacy systems and Oracle Fusion as the financial management system.
Below are some of the applications used by the university.
- Ellucian Banner - for maintaining student, faculty, course, alumni, financial, financial aid and personnel data.
- Scientia - for timetabling and scheduling exams.
- Tribal - as Student Information Systems (SIS)
- Kinetic - for managing student accommodation
- Blackbaud - for managing alumni
How NeosAlpha Helped
After a detailed assessment of the university’s requirements and existing systems, our technical solutions consultants proposed Microsoft’s Azure Integration Services (AIS) to build an integration solution connecting various applications, whether on-premise or in the cloud.
Following are the key AIS components employed by the solution,
- API management - to provide a secure and scalable way to expose APIs for the different systems.
- Logic Apps - to automate processes and workflows, reducing the need for manual intervention.
- Service Bus - to provide a messaging system that allowed different applications to communicate with each other.
And Azure Functions wherever a custom, complex business logic was required as part of the transformation.
Below are some of the important architectural decisions made as part of the solution building,
- We focused on building an API layer to expose the functionalities of the backend systems.
- We used event-driven integrations wherever possible. For example, we decoupled systems using a publish/subscribe model mediated by Azure’s Service Bus.
- We designed a robust retry mechanism to achieve high integrity so that no message is lost.
- We designed centralised logging, with a dashboard showing queue sizes, unhealthy integrations etc. We also enabled notifications to stakeholders through emails.
- To ensure the secure transfer of data between systems and secure data at rest, we leveraged TLS encryption, data encryption, role-based access control and multi-factor authentication.
We also set up fully automated CI/CD pipelines during the implementation phase using Azure DevOps.
Results
- With Azure API management, they had a unified and secure gateway for their public website and student portal to access their backend systems.
- Automation reduced the need for manual intervention, improving efficiency and reducing errors.
- The connected student lifecycle provided a complete view of the student journey, enabling the university to provide a better student experience.
- The solution was scalable, allowing the university to add new applications or processes as required quickly.
