A unified web platform

Copenhagen University College is a merger of the former vocational colleges UCC and Metropol with more than 20,000 students. Due to the merge, they needed to unify and strengthen both the user interface and internal workflows.

For instance, their IT architecture was expensive and complex, which created unclear workflows and made development processes slow and risky. The architecture also created a vague and diffuse experience for end users, who encountered different design expressions and presentations of content depending on which site they visited.

We developed a new design as well as an improved architecture with applications and data integrations across the organisation.

1. Micro-service architecture with reduced complexity
   To give you an insight into the complexity, the original websites contained approximately 10,000 pieces of content, which was written and created in three different newsrooms. Therefore, we focused on simplifying the overview of educations and minimizing manual workflows. We did so by simplifying the basic structure and developing several applications for publishing and sharing content.
2. A unified platform with many users and loose coupling
   Our strategy consisted of a number of loosely coupled and specialized systems that solved individual tasks at a high level rather than monolithic solutions, where all logic is placed in the same system and has many unique integrations. We established user management, administrative flows and rules for updating as well as data access.
3. Applications with deep integrations to business systems
   Copenhagen University College had previously developed a series of smaller applications as stand-alone solutions without the same integration layer. In connection to the upgrade, some of these could be closed, while others had to be moved to the new platform. The overall integration solution included:
   1. Integration of an education database and underlying registration systems.
   2. A two-way integration for logon, where users start their session on the CMS site, verify themselves against Active Directoryand are then granted access to the platform’s editorial interface.
   3. Integration with the course platform SIS to retrieve data on all classes, and to submit enrolments for further education.
4. Hosting and monitoring
   The cloud environment for web applications and integration layers is hosted by Advice in a redundant and load-balanced environment, which consists of basic components such as Cisco ASAv10 Firewall, HA Proxy Load Balancers, HTTP Accelerators (Varnish), Apache Web Servers, and Maria DB Databases.
   Among other things, the cloud environment has been upgraded with DDOS protection and has an uptime of 99.65%.

Go explore: Københavns Professionshøjskole

Results

• Search engine optimized and easy access to educations
• Fewer manual workflows
• More efficient editorial flows
• Content sharing applications across websites
• Direct data integration making self-service efficient across the underlying registries and ERP.
• Simplification of 20 single-integrations gathered in a few, well-structured data services.