Social Networking Portal for Alumni of International School

About our Customer:

Our client is a 60-year-old international school having a presence in more than 20 countries. They were in search of social media and collaboration platforms to connect their alumni members who were spread across the world.

 

Business Needs / Challenges:

• Social media functionalities like user profiles, follow/unfollow, posting features like Facebook or Twitter, feed lists, and like and comment features
• Job wall: to allow alumni members to create job listings.
• Event Center: to allow admins to publish the events on the platform and allow users to purchase tickets for those events.
• A personalized dashboard for users to arrange different widgets on their walls.

Solution:

• We have started by creating a Proof of Concept (POC) for this client to validate the technologies to be used for building this platform. The goals of PoC were (1) to validate the technology stack and its capabilities to sustain the system for at least the next 5 years. (2) Stress testing to verify the core functionality can perform with intended user traffic.
• We have proposed using Django as the main platform for this application. The reason for choosing Django is to have a mature platform and utilize ready-to-use core features like authentication, user and role management, etc. for the platform. This helps in reducing the development time for some of the core features and their maintenance.
• On top of Django, we have proposed using React JS for non-admin-type functionalities to make the application's user experience seamless.
• We have also used PostgreSQL as a database and ElasticSearch for faster search and querying purposes.
• After the PoC, we helped the client prepare the project's roadmap, which was planned to be released in incremental steps. We also helped to draft the system architecture design proposal.
• User login with multiple authentication types/providers like username+password, log in with Google, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter to allow easy access to the platform for users.
• Integrated the ERP system the client was using to sync data like users, groups, events, invoices for an event ticket purchase, etc.

BUSINESS IMPACT

• The new portal helped clients to connect with previous students; this helped increase new admission inquiries for the school.
• Better management of events and their registration processes. This helped our client to save around 30% of the bandwidth of the administration team.

Key features:

• SPA application with React JS on top of Django framework.
• Elasticsearch integration for faster search and filtering.
• Geo-location based search with an interactive amp for users at the city level.
• Social media features like posting, like, connecting, sharing, profile connecting, etc.
• Infrastructure setup on AWS with CI/CD.
• Login with social media platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Application Architecture :