School Management System

Janadan Languages and Amgad International
Cairo, Egypt

The SmartPhoton School Management System was developed for Janadan Languages and Amgad International Schools. The application helps teachers and school staff members communicate more effectively with students and parents.

The system maintains three different record types: Student, Parent and Staff. Student records contain important information such as: contact details, medical files, certificates, soft skills and special instructions from parents. Parent records include: first and last name, relationship to student, age, education level, careers and skills. Staff files include personnel (and other human resources) files, qualifications, skills, attendance records and achievements.

User friendly and feature rich data entry screens, thanks to one of many Iron Speed Designer built-in screen types.

Every record contains valuable information and encourages staff to make informed decisions on behalf of their students, in real-time.

Application size and scope

The application accesses one Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database comprised of more than 90 tables and ten database views. The application contains approximately 100 web pages and has around 2,700 named users.

The School Management System processes hundreds of thousands of transactions per month which include:

	Daily attendance records.
	Marks records.
	Assignments.
	Messages.
	Library borrowing transactions.
	Assets management transactions.
	Transportation management.
	Medical records.
	Disciplinary management records.
	Document records.

The main menu of the system shows its comprehensiveness in covering most of school aspects.

The project

The School Management System took three team members three months to implement. The Iron Speed Designer portion of the project took two developers and a system analyst two calendar months to complete.

Code extensions and customizations

Several code customizations were required for this project, a few being:

	Email alerts.
	Audit trail.
	Interlinked menus.
	Text concatenation.
	Passing Parameters.
	Password encryption.

We spent about two weeks writing a few hundred lines of custom code. No third-party components were required for successful implementation of the School Management System.

The School Management Systems' internal messaging function.

Page layout customizations

We used the standard Pompeii page style in Iron Speed Designer. We found that the wide range of styles provided actually exceeded our requirements.

Iron Speed Designer impact

We saved approximately 2,000 person-hours and approximately $70,000 in development costs using Iron Speed Designer. Without the tool, it would have taken at least two to three months longer.

Our project would have hardly been feasible because of the extra time and sales effort that would be needed to achieve the breakeven point. Iron Speed Designer made the breakeven point easier to achieve.

Next steps

The future of the School Management System looks very promising. It can be fully individualized to fit the special requirements of different schools. The extensibility of the application grows horizontally and vertically. For example, new areas and aspects of school management and automation are being added to the system. This is in addition to improving and increasing the features and capabilities of the existing areas and aspects of the system.

The School Management System is designed to fit a wide spectrum of school requirements. More than ten schools have shown strong interest in this system, which would then raise the total number of users to more than 15,000.

About the developer

Mohannad Amr has been in the software development industry for 14 years. He has a BCs in Computational Physics from Jordan, and an MBA in IT Management from Leicester University, UK. He has worked in several roles, including as group IT Manager of an IT solution integrator of 16 offices in the EMEA region. Mohannad is PMP, MCSD, MCP and MSF certified. Mohannad has been using Iron Speed Designer since early 2005 and has managed at least ten applications and several enterprise level solutions using Iron Speed Designer. In addition to business solution architecture and project management, Mohannad has a special interest in modeling business processes and workflow systems.