Custom built bespoke parent mobile applications for Schools

With the dominance of smart phones all businesses and organizations are switching to mobile applications to offer their services to their end customers. In most of the cases if not all many of the key features are made available in the mobile apps and it is convenient and faster for both the end user and businesses to deliver services and information.

In the Education sector and especially Schools and training institutes almost everyone has some or other information system implemented and in use that will be used to manage and track the students, curriculum, school fees, stores and many other services and event which the schools are related to. Schools will have a public website to share the school information and profile, also they may extend some basic and key services via online also. However it may not be as convenient and helpful for the parents as it would be in a mobile application. Hence inevitably the need of mobile application for school is imperative. Now a days more and more parents and school prefer to use mobile apps for their communications and tracking and the feature offered in the mobile applications are growing the enhancement of smart phone technologies like GPS Tracking etc.

Even though there are ready to use mobile application subscription basis they have their own limitation in terms of pre-set features and difficulty in the implementing the changes each school may need geographically, culturally and language. Also each school prefers to have their branding and goodwill to be re-iterated and established each time they are in touch with the parents of their wards and in each emails sent out. For renowned and premium international schools it is matter pride that they need to stand out from the common group and promote a sperate and bespoke custom built mobile application that can offer way more features and facilities than a standard school mobile application.

The only solution in this context is the build a bespoke mobile application for themselves with the key and important features that can add value and assurance to parents. The key areas of changes that may called for are follows,

Name and branding of the School App for Parents

Any school authorities will prefer to have the School mobile app in their own name and logo with the same color branding look and feel of their entity to retain the consistency. This will enhance the reliability and a sense of belonging to the parents and school team also.

Integration with School Management / Information Systems

Managing an additional system by the school Admin is a tedious and time consuming task. Also to reduce and avoid human error it will be always recommended to have the Mobile application system integrated with their management system. By this the same data will be used in mobile applications also and all the timely changes that are done in the main School information system will reflect in the mobile application data also. The Integration with The School management system can be triggered optionally manually or can scheduled for. A specific time in a day. For security and accuracy the data for the mobile app are updated every day.

Additional Features and Customizations

Standard and pre-defined mobile application solutions are rigid and restrict the flexibility in adding new features and changes in existing features. Depending on the need of the hour additional features and changes are called for and may be need to implement the same at short notice. In case of bespoke mobile application solutions this is fairly easy to implement due to the exclusivity of the code base used. Some of the new features that not in standard school mobile applications are as follows,

• Co-Curricular activities (CCA)
• Appointment management of Teachers
• Sports and Events Management.
• Parents Evening
• Store purchases
• Online payment
• Absence reporting
• Reporting unauthorized absence

Depending on the no. of students in the school and the choice of parents to receive notifications and email from the school the unified broadcasting feature need to customized as per the schools request.

Control Panel Website for Manage Contents and Users

Same as the bespoke mobile application for parents the backed Control panel site (Content Management website – CMS) has also needed customization and changes as per the needs of the school admin. Also in some cases there may different users from different departments will be authorized to manage and control the application. In most scenarios the marketing department of the school will be in charges of general contents of the app a and sending of notices and messages whereas the academic team will be responsible for the management of the students. The end users of the app i.e., parents access will be controlled by the IT admin and network team. In such cases the backend users privileges and access has to controlled and the system should be altered to adapt to such requirements also. The advantages of the bespoke system is that we can roll out the needed changes without worrying about dependencies of other instances of the same system.

Technology

Depending on the preference and budget allocation of each project the mobile applications are built using the native or hybrid technologies. It is generally recommended to develop the mobile applications for school using native Android and iOS technology. If hybrid technology is used the mobile apps can be developed using a single code base using standard web technologies. The most widely used hybrid mobile technology frameworks are ionic, cordova, Zamarin etc. The CMS control panel is developed using any latest web technologies, however the most common, faster and cost effective technology stack used are PHP with Laravel Framework and mySQL or PostgreSQL and the database to store data.

Server Hosting Security

All our backend CMS sites are hosted in PCI-DSS compliant cloud hosting servers and the data transport between the server and mobile devices are accessed only with validated user credentials. Each time a user access the data, the data transfer is encrypted and with security keys and each session validated token for specific duration of time.