Overview

The New York State Education Department is part of the University of the State of New York (USNY), one of the most complete, interconnected systems of educational services in the United States.

Their mission is to raise the knowledge, skill, and opportunity of all the people in New York. Their vision is to provide leadership for a system that yields the best educated people in the world. 

Project Scope

New York State Library is seeking a vendor to provide web-based data collection applications used to compile statistical data required for mandated Federal and State reporting purposes, as well as other data collection purposes, and a web-based application for library data dissemination.

Solution

V Group plays an important role as a subcontractor, providing technical support for web-based data collection applications. This project has been implemented in two phases: Phase 1: Enhancement to the Existing Collect Application, and Phase 2: Development of the Collect Dashboard.
Solutions are as follows:
1.    The V Group IT Project Team presented a modernized design layout for the Collect Application. The same was implemented and the user experience was also improvised.
2.    Survey Manager application used for the Survey Setup was worked upon to implement relational mapping for the related survey questions. The Survey questions mapped to one another were made retrievable from the GUI for easy navigation and operations of the users.
3.    Issues related to data loss were reported by users when the same survey was worked upon by many concurrent library users. The issue was resolved with Ajax Implementation.
4.    Realtime validations having complex edit checks were triggered along with on screen linkages to the associated fields basis which the data gets computed.
5.    Configurable notifications were built for different user roles to have automated triggers on survey milestones as per the configurations done by the admin/data coordinator.
6.    Various options of Survey data export in excel for the entire survey for specific libraries or consolidated responses of all libraries within a state, export of Dashboard data was designed and implemented for comprehensive reporting.
7.    Design for Storage and Retrieval of audit logs for Survey responses were implemented for each and every user input.
8.    Retrieval of historical data for the responses to survey question for the last five financial years were implemented to provide a comprehensive view of the responses of the current year vs the variation over years.
9.    Implementation of User Access Management and explicit confirmation of user contact details by the individual library users were mandated per user per survey prior to working on any survey.
10.    Feature of Batch import and update of Survey Data in Collect Application post submission at the Public Library Services- Web Portal has been implemented for the State Data Coordinators for future references and for maintenance of consistent data.
11.    A dashboard was developed based on the access privileges of various user personas for effective tracking and control of library’s progress of their relevant surveys and thereby ensuring compliance. The Dashboard was built having executive summary, multiple filters and searches boxes working in conjunction with one another along with Charts for quantitative representation of the Progress.
12.    Reporting features were implemented as per the requirements of various user roles –Web & PDF Report of the Surveys, Excel Reports for the State Data Coordinators involving survey details of all Libraries, and PDF exports of the charts.

Technology

VB .NET, ASP.NET, C#. MS SQL Server, WPF, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, & AzureDevOps