The Children's Guild

The Children's Guild

URL: http://www.childrensguild.org

Technologies Used: ASP.NET, Custom Business Solutions, DotNetNuke, E-Commerce, E-Commerce, Microsoft, Non-Profit, SQL, Websites

Challenge: The Children's Guild first came to VMT to build a custom reporting application that provided sophisticated statistics measuring the success of their programs which serve emotionally disturbed children. This reporting is an essential component to manage and improve their educational and support programs and is utilized in state and national reporting. After this critical need was fulfilled, The Children's Guild expanded the project to build an enterprise Student Information System, producing a central database for student records. In addition, The Children's Guild needed the ability to manage content through a .NET content management system for new ventures they were launching, The Upside Down Organization and The Monarch Academy. Their resource to implement DotNetNuke was naturally, VMT.

Solution: VMT has had an ongoing collaborative engagement with The Children's Guild that employs a hybrid approach to the software development life cycle incorporating the best of waterfall with agile development. We begin our process with requirements gathering resulting in functional specifications that all stakeholders review and accept. Then, an iterative development process is used to present functional elements of the application on a regular basis that are tested and reviewed. Once user acceptance testing is complete, the component is deployed to production. DotNetNuke was deployed for the first site, upsidedownorganization.org with the e-commerce component, calendar and basic web page creation. The next site to deploy was for the new Monarch Academy Charter School opened by The Children's Guild, monarchcharter.org. And, VMT is now in the process of upgrading childrensguild.org web site to DotNetNuke with many advanced modules.

Results: The software VMT developed to capture and report student information and activities is now deployed throughout the organization as ISIS (Integrated Student Information System). Information once kept on individual spreadsheets and Word documents is now maintained and disseminated through ISIS. The sites depolyed in DotNetNuke have been managed and expanded by internal staff saving substantially on the costs for external firms to perform the same tasks. Content is more dynamic and more fresh, reflecting the nature of the organization successfully.