EDS Intranet

This project is an intranet for a private school called Escola Domingos Sávio located in Cabo Frio - RJ, Brazil.

Started in September 2016 but discontinued in late 2021.

I worked as the sole developer and maintainer of the project.

Objective

The goal was to create an online platform for the students, teachers and staff of the school to communicate and share information.

We decided to reuse the code of a legacy system written in Grails, which was made to serve several public schools in Brazil.

The legacy system consisted of 3 modules:

1. Administrative: used by the school’s administrative staff to manage the school’s data, such as students, teachers, classes, etc.
2. Report Card: where teachers publish students’ grades and students can see their report with grades and absences for each term and school year. One of the requirements of the new system was that the person responsible for the student could also access the platform and see the school report card, along with other data, such as occurrences in the classroom.
3. Social Network: a social network where students can post messages, photos and videos, and teachers can post announcements, study materials and other information. I created the basis of this module at the very beginning of the development of this legacy system, which was in mid-2014.

I started working on the project by creating a new version of the system using the same technologies and architecture, adapting it to the school’s needs.

Challenges

The first challenge was to adapt the student enrollment process to the school’s needs, which was very different from the one used by the public schools.

Other changes were made to the administrative module, such as the creation of new user roles for the staff and the student guardian.

The second challenge was to rebuild the report card module, which had a totally different grade calculation system than the one used by the school.

I had to create a new system from scratch, which was not easy because the school had a very complex and unique grading system.

The social network module remained untouched.

Results

After a few months of development, the system was ready to be used by the school’s staff and students.

The school’s staff was very happy with the new system, which was much more intuitive and easy to use than the old one.

The students and teachers also liked the new system. The students parents were also very happy and started requesting some new features, such as the ability to pay school fees online.

Success

The system was used by the school’s staff and students for about 5 years, until the school decided to discontinue the project.

Besides some minor bugs, the system worked very well and was very stable.