danseagrave.net - The National Institute for Adult Continuing Education

Drupal webform CRM Integration

dan — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 20:42:42 +0000

2009 - 2012

Skills:

Drupal

PHP

MS Dynamics SDK

Office Automation

Client:

The National Institute for Adult Continuing Education

At short notice NIACE were required to run a bidding process for a £1M grant giving programme.

A similar bidding process in the previous year required lots of paper photocopies and many hours of admin staff time to collate and score.

For this new fund I built a multi-page application form using Drupal's webform module to collect the applications. I then built an integration module that would transfer the single form submission into a collection of related CRM records (Contacts, submission, risks, work items, etc).

I then built appropriate reports and entities to allow the scoring of these reports to be entered directly into the CRM, further reducing the administration time.

This new approach was so successful and the funders were happy with the work done that NIACE were asked to administer similar grant giving programmes in subsequent years. We were able to take on these programmes with confidence processing and scoring applications with minimal upfront work.

In those subsequent years I added an MS Word based alternative data entry format. Taking advantage of the automation features of MS Word to programmatically extract data from emailed application documents and enter them into the CRM system.

The system has processed over 5000 applicaions for a total of £7 Million and I have used the underlying platform to support other similar data gathering tasks as required by the Institute.

ALW Award Nominations

dan — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 20:23:08 +0000

2008 - present

Skills:

ASP

MS Dynamics SDK

Type:

Software

Website

Client:

The National Institute for Adult Continuing Education

Adult Learners' Week is a national celebration of lifelong learning; the biggest in England. The Week is now in its 24th year and has inspired Adult Learners' Week celebrations across the world.

I have maintained the legacy Classic ASP awards nominations system since 2008 and implemented many improvements to the front end user experience and data handling.

In 2009 I added a new backend system to transfer 1000s of flat file nominations into NIACE's MS Dynamics CRM system, generating 10s of thousands of normalised CRM records (implementing duplicate contact detection and avoidance routines). This system has a simple text based configuration language to allow for easy updating each year when new award types and fields are added to the schema.

Adult Learners' Week Website

dan — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 12:29:18 +0000

2009 - present

Skills:

Drupal

PHP

HTML

CSS

Javascript

Accessibility

SOAP

MS Dynamics SDK

Type:

Website

Client:

The National Institute for Adult Continuing Education

For the past three years I have led on the technical development of the Adult Learners' Week website. This has included:

Yearly re-skinning with new brand
New features
- Javascript widgets for embedding ALW content on partner sites
- MS Dynamics CRM integration. Registered drupal users automatically associated with their contact in the CRM system and profile data updated.
- Improvements to "What's-on-guide" style events uploading and searching system. Including fixing the broken multiple-event upload system (Supporting uploading 100s of events via single Excel spreadsheet, the previous CSV based system was prone to many user errors requiring lots of staff time to fix).

Visit the Adult Learners' Week Website