Personal Knowledge Management Solution

Custom workflow that automates new account creation process and payment processing
Scalable amount of personal data
Access to a community of users for educational purposes

Expertise

Web & Enterprise Portals

Content & Document Management

Business Intelligence

Business Process Automation

Verticals

ISV

An innovative Office 365 solution for personal knowledge management and collaboration between users with an automated custom workflow and payment processing.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Solution
Development Process
Results
Customer Voice

Context

Our Customer, AlignPM, Inc., is a knowledge and process management consulting agency specializing in solutions designed to enable awareness and action. They came up with an idea of launching an innovative personal knowledge management solution — my-Know — that would provide the end users with an opportunity to work with their personal data (organize, store, manage, etc.) safely and easily.

The new product is a Cloud solution built in Microsoft Office 365. The solution is based on a custom SharePoint template that was set up and modified by our Customer. However, in order to be successful on the market, it needed considerable enhancement: automating payment process for new clients, developing a workflow to automate the process of creating new user and populate user data, etc. These changes would make the solution easier in terms of implementation and maintenance, as well as provide better user experience in general.

Since the solution enhancement required certain programming skills, the Customer decided to entrust the project to Iflexion SharePoint specialists due to their “attitude, offered methodology and satisfaction of business needs”.

Project Objectives

The Customer’s Office 365 tenant required developing a workflow automation process that would perform the following:

Accept automated regular subscription payments and one time setup fee through integration with Authorize.Net payment processing platform
Create new user accounts in the Customer’s tenant and populate user data provided by the user registration form
Verify new user names and email addresses
Create SharePoint Site Collections using the my-Know SharePoint template
Assign new users to the created Site Collections
Send automated welcome emails to new users

Solution

The Customer offers their clients an Office 365 knowledge management solution that allows storing personal data, accessing a community of users for education purposes (learning and sharing), as well as enjoying some business class services (Outlook email client, Skype for Business, Microsoft Office Online, etc.). The solution has the following user roles:

End users who store their personal data, edit and add content to the sites created for their accounts
Administrator who manages all end user data

New clients use the payment form developed by Iflexion and integrated into the Customer’s website to subscribe for a monthly or yearly plan and choose the license type (E1 for my-Know with Office 365 online tools, E3 for my-Know with Office 365 online and desktop suite). This means the end users pay for their subscription and then our Customer provides them with the product and takes care of all the license aspects.

Iflexion SharePoint team developed a custom workflow that automates the process of creating new accounts and processing payments. The solution can now automatically create new Office 365 user accounts and new sites for them to store their personal data (notes, ideas, photos, documents, etc.) with 5 GB of data per user. The amount of personal data stored within the solution by the users is scalable according to their preferences.

The solution also has a mobile version which allows using it on the go. Iflexion team performed the modification of the standard SharePoint look in order to provide the consumers with better user experience (for instance, changing the standard icons, hiding unused SharePoint controls).

Development Process

Our team has worked out the communication process to suite the Customer’s needs; we used Skype and phone calls, emails, online demos, etc., to keep the Customer updated on the project flow and discuss occurring questions.

Iflexion SharePoint specialists used a new Office 365 Graph API to create new Office 365 users within the Customer’s tenant. As far as the solution architecture is concerned, the developed workflow and payment forms are hosted on Microsoft Azure which has access to Authorize.net platform for payments, and then uses Office 365 via Graph API to create new sites. It was initially planned to perform a simple integration with Authorize.net with manual recurring billing option and Authorize.net-hosted payment form. However, it would mean that the clients would have to use the payment form on the Customer’s website every time they had to pay the fee according to their subscription plan. In order to make this process easier for the end users, it was decided to automate recurring billing transactions by creating Microsoft Azure-hosted payment forms and using Authorize.Net ARB API: this way the money would be automatically transferred from the client’s bank account every month / year.

To ensure the solution’s high quality, Iflexion allocated 2 Quality Assurance engineers to work on the project. They performed functional testing of the workflow, cross browser testing, testing the template created by the workflow on different devices. As a result, several minor defects were found and eliminated, and the solution quality was estimated as high.