SpotApp – Educational platform with HubSpot integrations

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Case study

SpotApp – Educational platform with HubSpot integrations

  • SaaS
  • Web Apps
SpotApp was built for WSiP, one of Poland’s most important educational publishers. The firm has operated continuously since 1945, printed millions of textbooks, and been online since 1998. In 2011, WSiPnet.pl became an educational platform for students and a portal offering materials for teachers. An average of 1.2 million users per month visit WSiP sites and download 12 million educational materials from one of the company’s sites (Uczę.pl).
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Challenge

Creating an application that would facilitate the work of educational consultants.

WSiP needed a tool to help education consultants and Telecenter staff obtain information from teachers, mainly through surveys. Previously, each educational consultant surveyed teachers in written form and then entered the survey results into the system, usually before an upcoming grading period.
One of WSiP’s goals was to free its staff from unnecessary paperwork and digitize its processes. After consultation with us, they determined that a web application would be the best solution. It would enable educational consultants to collaborate more efficiently and easily to complete their teacher surveys. Once the surveys were completed, all data could be uploaded to HubSpot, the CRM platform that connected all of WSiP’s processes and managed data. The application would also streamline the work of Telecenter employees, who could use SpotApp to record phone calls made to teachers to sign them up for meetings and conferences via a dedicated module.
WSiP was looking to build a professional product, first through an MVP with basic functions that would then be further developed with new modules. To ensure the software would meet the audience’s needs, we conducted a comprehensive product workshop for the client to address current challenges and issues, then began working to build a dedicated system.
One of the project’s important elements was creating an intuitive design and designing the entire application with gamification to increase user engagement. The product was supposed to run directly on prisoners’ individual tablets. To do so, we had to implement a number of security features preventing outsiders from gaining unauthorized access.

The project’s key challenges included the following:

The need to translate business knowledge into technical knowledge
Analyzing the functionality that should be built at the MVP stage
HubSpot integration
Providing appropriate mechanisms to meet security requirements
AWS cloud services deployment
Active Directory authentication
Meet performance requirements to support numerous simultaneous users
Adapt to mobile devices such as tablets.

Our solution

How did we help the Client achieve their business goals?

EDUCATION FACILITATING THE WORK OF EDUCATIONAL CONSULTANTS

Through Scrum processes, SpotApp is developed in two work phases. In the first phase, we created an MVP that included the functionalities that WSiP employees needed most and then tested it with the audience. In the second phase, we will build an administrator panel and a dedicated module for Telecenter employees called Central Meetings.

The three main modules completed at this stage included:

Questionnaire Statement - for educational consultants
Questionnaire Statement - for Telecenter employees
A profiling survey
We designed a stable interface to connect our solution with HubSpot’s API to meet the project requirements. Implementing this integration was challenging since we received all our data from HubSpot’s environment. HubSpot’s API also imposed limitations we had to deal with on an ongoing basis.
To scale the application appropriately, we built a solution that allows users to multiply the limits placed on queries imposed by the CRM and the algorithm that manages queries when a limit is encountered. To check performance, we performed tests to verify the solution’s reliability. We also completed unit tests and code reviews to check the application for bugs.
The infrastructure of the development version of the app was deployed via AWS Cloud Services, guaranteeing both the availability and security of the service during development and testing process. Per the client’s request, the production version of the application was adapted for deployment on its private servers, additionally protected by VPN. The automation of the entire deployment and integration process was made possible by using Bitbucket Pipelines and Docker.
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SCOPE OF WORK

Key Project Elements Delivered

01.
Application integration with the HubSpot API
An interface that intermediates between HubSpot's API and SpotApp.
02.
UI/UX design
Our UX designer designed the visually appealing user interface.
03.
User authentication
The system allows new data to be added on an ongoing basis. For example, new users can be added and authenticated using Active Directory.
04.
Performance and unit tests
Performance tests verified the platform's reliability, and unit tests checked for bugs in the code.
05.
Application scaling
The solution multiplies query limits imposed by CRM and uses an algorithm that manages queries when a limit is encountered.
06.
Application deployment
The live application was deployed on WSiP’s private servers, and the development version used AWS Docker services. With this AWS service, distributed applications are created, delivered, and launched reliably.
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STUNNING TECHNOLOGIES

AWS Docker/Bitbucket/PHP 8/Symfony 5.4.1/React 18/TypeScript/

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