Enterprise Apps Special: Enterprise Application Integration

Pacsoft integrates Lyceum using .Net

Pacsoft has transformed the legacy system running on its Lyceum product successfully using .NET and is offering it to educational institutions. Abhinav Singh reports

Lyceum is named after the oldest school in ancient Greece, founded by Aristotle. This educational software was originally developed about 10 years ago by Bangalore-based Pacsoft Solutions. The solution has been deployed in around 1,800 schools across 255 locations in India. Pacsoft felt the need to upgrade its existing solution with new functions to enhance its capacity to serve educational institutions effectively and reliably. Lyceum had a separate ERP system running on the DOS and Novell platforms. In addition, there was an intranet connecting different school branches based on the NT and Unix platforms (NT was talking to Unix to transfer data) and an online educational portal for students using basic HTML and Java. Now, using the .NET platform, all three disparate legacy systems were integrated into the new version of Lyceum. All the three have been seamlessly integrated into a single platform and the limitations of the legacy system have been done away with.

Lyceum online

Lyceum didn’t have the mobility and the flexibility aspect in it and usage was restricted to a given, fixed point. This needed to change and new features were necessary, says Ali Sait

The online version of the product is known as my-lyceum.net. Here the educational institution’s information is made available to external entities like parents, teachers, and students by means of a Web portal. This portal is hosted out of Pacsoft’s data centre in Bangalore on Proliant servers that offer a consolidated view of the student’s performance and effectively establish a channel of communication between the teacher and the parent using industry-standard XML. The portal connects to different financial institutions and vendors through BizTalk Server and .NET Web services to provide online presentment and payment services.

Besides this, Pacsoft has also added many new features to Lyceum using the .NET platform. 30-35 educational institutions across the country are running the new integrated version of Lyceum and Pacsoft is hopeful that the complete installed based of 1,800 institutions will graduate to the new integrated version by December 2004.

The need to integrate and upgrade

Pacsoft felt that it was important to integrate the different components running under Lyceum as it did not facilitate mobility and flexibility. As Pacsoft was aiming at adding new features, system integration became essential. However, this had to be done without changing the basic structure of the solution. The educational ERP system in Lyceum has 12 modules and different educational institutions were using different modules depending on their needs and requirements. These modules include information management, marks cards, student monitoring, fees management, admission management, teacher monitoring, payroll management, financial accounting, time table, question papers, library management and inventory management.

Listening to users

In order to get feedback from existing users of Lyceum, Pacsoft went in for a comprehensive feedback exercise that lasted nearly two years. Pacsoft’s support team that conducted the exercise spoke to different sections of people involved in the educational system. The consensus was in favour of adding mobility and anytime, anywhere accessibility to the whole system. Ali Sait, managing director, Pacsoft solutions says, “Lyceum didn’t have the mobility and the flexibility aspect in it and its usage was restricted to a given, fixed point. We needed to change this by adding new features.”

According to Tarun Malik, the main objective of Pacsoft was to have a platform that would help in automating their processes after integration and cut down system cost and time

The wishlist broadly constituted incorporating devices and natural interfaces such as speech recognition, handwriting recognition, scanner interface, pocket PC interface and Tablet PC to the existing system and making it mobile phone-compatible. It was also felt that Lyceum should be made more user-friendly so that every staff member could use it easily. The consensus also aimed at providing better facilities to students at a lower cost using the software. The examination board wanted effective communication with its affiliated institutions to get relevant information for conducting examinations.

In the same way, the education department of the government wanted to keep an effective eye on the functioning of institutions within the state and the vendor community wanted better methods to tap business opportunities in any educational institution. The wishlist also included a request for graphical representation of data and for tools that would help improve the overall academic performance of students. It hoped that all the people associated with an educational institution would be brought under one connected environment through the new system.

The evaluation exercise

Pacsoft undertook a thorough evaluation exercise before going ahead with the integration process. Sait says, “Before going in for the .NET platform we assessed many other different platforms as we wanted a platform that would give us scalability, availability and security. The evaluation lasted for nearly six months.” But why the .NET platform? Pacsoft found that .NET addressed the aspects of scalability, availability and security. .NET offered speech .NET, pocket PC support, the .NET framework, and SQL Server 2000. With XML support in the platform, Lyceum could address the availability requirement as it can connect to any system irrespective of the platform it is running on. The Web services aspect of the .NET platform connects an educational campus to the data centre of Pacsoft solutions. The data centre is regularly updated from different locations and is always available.

Tarun Malik, product marketing manager, Microsoft India says, “The main objective of Pacsoft during the evaluation process was to have a platform that would help them in automating their processes after integration and which would cut down system cost and time.”

The integration

The project to integrate the legacy systems using the .NET platform began in February 2002 and concluded in June 2003 in a time frame of 18 months. The integration involved different components of the .NET platform, which include Windows 2003 server, SQL Server, Web services, Commerce Server and BizTalk Server, apart from others. The project cost was $2 million. Around 50 programmers from Pacsoft worked on the project. The Microsoft team consisted of a team of four consultants who worked with the Pacsoft team. To start with, Pacsoft ran successful pilots of the newly integrated product in around 10-12 schools. The pilots went on for nearly a year. Microsoft also had a five-day training session for Pacsoft’s team.

Benefits for Pacsoft

The benefits of this integration have been manifold. The flexible and scalable object-oriented nature of the .NET platform has made reusability of code very easy. Besides this, Pacsoft has found the SQL Server database is user-friendly and there was no difficulty in upgrading its legacy database on dBASE and Access to SQL Server. Pacsoft has also observed that the integration has resulted in greater stability. The Web services the .NET platform has provided for the product has been a winner for the company wherever it has implemented the new integrated version of the product.

The integration has been seamless. Sait adds, “Microsoft has a stack of desktop products, server products and Web services that can talk to each other, thereby resulting in seamless integration. Programming is very easy and the development of applications is very easy on the .NET platform.”

New add-ons to the product have been made. The product has been smart card-enabled in order to give students a single access to the whole system through a card and plans are underway to add cell phone features into the product.

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com