Ecolint - International School of Geneva
Unify a diverse community with a mobile first intranet.
Strengthening the Ecolint community
Through a collaborative platform
Founded in 1924 and the world's first international school, Ecolint prides itself on contributing to a better world through its education. It awards several diplomas including the international baccalaureate and provides education based on openness, excellence and education for peace.
The Ecolint educational community brings together more than 10,000 people, including parents, students as well as teaching, technical and administrative staff.
The objective of the project was to redesign the school community portal, an essential pillar of the functioning of the school and of cohesion within the school community.
The challenge
Unify a diverse community with a cohesive and comprehensive solution
The school is made up of a very diverse community: 8 schools based on 3 campuses with autonomous operating modes, 140 nationalities, several sectors, many interest groups, staff also parents ... all these elements make centralization and unichannel communication not possible. In this context, the multiplication of communication channels inherent in this configuration had become problematic, generating the dispersion and overload of information, targets not reached and a lack of consistency.
The objective was to build a MyEcolint platform that meets the specific needs of this international school and its large community to facilitate exchanges and strengthen Ecolint community feeling. It was therefore necessary to create a site that would restore unity by allowing both central communication and a relevant and fully personalised user experience.
Solutions and technologies
Create a personalised user experience with Drupal
Inovae has built a platform that has made it possible to re-establish central communication, essential for bringing together all the information useful to the various members, offering them the opportunity to be informed of the many events of Ecolint: meetings with parents of students, various activities , information sessions, sport, arts center, etc.
A 100% personalised solution
The platform has been profiled to meet the specific needs of each user, giving them, depending on their category, dedicated and unique information, whether it comes from general communication or related to their place of work, study (the campus, school, classroom) or their role.
A neat and UX-oriented interface
Significant work has been done to optimise the interface of the platform as much as possible in order to make it as pleasant, practical and easy to learn for users as possible. Emphasis was placed on user experience (UX) and UI design, focusing on key elements of graphics and navigation.
Granularity in profiles
Parent profiles inherit the profiles of their child (ren) and the system allows them to create filters in order to view the information as they wish.
Enhanced accessibility
Significant work has been done to optimise the interface of the platform as much as possible in order to make it as pleasant, practical and easy to learn for users as possible. The site is optimised to work as much on desktop as on mobile or tablet. And to meet the multicultural audience of Ecolint, the site is bilingual French / English.
Drupal to manage the complexity of the project
At the request of the customer who wanted to keep control of the developments, it was on Drupal 8 that the solution was developed. Large tailor-made modules have been created to build the profiling system automatically, in connection with the CRM, and the APIs of several third-party services (educational database, extracurricular activities). The information entered in the profile also feeds into the CRM.
Additional features
New features such as notifications, management of favorites or even dynamic personal calendar have made it possible to meet the primary and practical needs of users. React JS was used for updating profile, handling notifications, and managing favorites. React JS has allowed the realization of interfaces more dynamic than in PHP.
