USC Law Portal Facelift
The MyLaw USC portal is getting a facelift this upcoming month with active AJAX and full customization
Case Studies
USC MyMarshall
A portal for the USC Marshall School of Business that currently servers over 32,000 undergraduates, graduates, and alumni. The Portal integrated a set of custom web applications, three third-party systems from the Darden School of Business, one third-party survey application (UltimateSurvey), and one third-party payment processing application (Verisign Payflow Pro). The main challenge we faced is integrating the different databases of information that every department had generated over the years into a single consolidated system. The solution was to agree on a single database schema that absorbed and didn’t discard any of the data that the departments had collected over time.
USC MyLaw
A portal for the USC Gould School of Law that currently serves 9,000 graduates and alumni. This particular Portal integrates a set of in-house web applications, Google Apps for Education (which includes email, docs, and calendar), UltimateSurvey, BaseCamp, SmarterStats, Paypal, and Outlook Web Access. Via this portal we provide single sign on into Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and the Survey System. We also use API calls to provision accounts across two systems: Active Directory and the Google Apps domain. The power of the integration that we accomplished in this system can be better appreciated via a demonstration, but the challenge was the single username & password problem. They wanted Google Apps, and about five other systems to talk to one another without the user having to remember multiple usernames & passwords, and we accomplished this.
WestsideRentals.com
This particular venture is not in the non-profit sector and at any given time it has over 20,000 active paid members, it was featured in NBC, ABC News, The New York Times, and Entrepreneur.com. It is the single largest rental website in Southern California for the last ten years, and our biggest challenge with this was re-designing it for landlords to be able to use it without much computer knowledge. Our target audience of landlords is a demographic above 40 years of age and not computer savvy, this posed the problem of how do we bring them in to upload photos & post their listings. We accomplished it via focus groups, weekly feedback sessions (with food & wine as an incentive), and several iterations to make it just perfect & easy.