Client
The Client is a British company established with an aim to help anybody associated with the British Armed Forces. Whether someone is thinking of leaving the Services, wants a career change or is looking for work, OA can help them with employment and transition advice, at any stage of their career. They have a team of experienced consultants who guide one through a one-to-one discussion where they review their CV and discuss their options. Customers then have the opportunity to access the company’s contact list, jobs board and attend their employment symposiums, where they can meet and network with former-officers and hear their experiences. They also provide a service to Employers (at no cost), offering them the best possible access to officers in the process of leaving the Services, and former-officers who are looking for new roles.
Throughout its existence the organization has supported Officers and their dependents in many ways, but it has consistently addressed, as a priority, helping officers find employment, providing advice and, in cases of need, financial support.
The Task
The organization wanted to develop an App for their registered commissioned officers (from the Armed forces) to search for jobs available which can also be shared with other Organization members. The App needed to be developed on SFDC platform and the user should be able to search and browse the Organization Events and Webinars catalog and also, register for events that are of his interest.
It should allow communication with OA Network Contacts, where the user can browse, sort and filter upcoming and On Demand Webinars.
The App should allow users to watch On Demand Webinars via YouTube and user should be able to update and upload their CV and book Career Consultations. Options for updating the users with OA news and Blog and allowing them to share the news via social media needs to be supported within the app.
The Technology
Phonegap
PhoneGap, also known as Apache Cordova, is an amazing cross platform framework, that allows the developers to develop mobile applications that supports multiple platforms like iOS, Android, Windows and more. It’s an open-source framework for mobile app development. Development on Phonegap is based on having experience in technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The apps created with PhoneGap also supports hardware features like GPS, camera, storage, contact, network through APIs. PhoneGap is an important tool for programmers/developers looking into developing cross platform mobile applications quickly and with less effort.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a cloud computing company that provides an interface for its customers to manage leads, cases, tasks, events and more. Out of its multiple products and applications, Salesforce is best known for its Customer Relationship Management(CRM) product. The customization allowed from Salesforce makes it a highly adaptive CRM to create the exact process involved for any business like custom Bill of Material to Invoices and auto follow up.
Wordpress
Wordpress is an online open source website creation tool and offers one of the easiest and powerful blogging and website content management systems (CMS).It is based on PHP and MySQL. About 22.5% of all websites on the internet are powered by Wordpress. It also provides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) functionality through the wordpress SEO plugin.
Our Solution
We have used Phonegap platform for the development of this application which supports Windows, Android and IOS compatible app development.Using Phonegap, with the same piece of code we can generate different build packages for different platforms.
We have used JS Force plugin which helps in import and export of data to Salesforce which the user enters in the App or Salesforce, we have created objects in Salesforce which dynamically update the latest Events and Webinars in the App. We have created a tab “Network Contact” in Salesforce where the officers who wish to get in connection with other officers of the association are shown and they can be added by other members via App or Salesforce. The user can register for upcoming Webinars by clicking on button which will redirect to the browser which we have done by using “OnClick” function.
The user can keep them updated by OA news and Blogs which are posted on Officers Association website via App, for this feature we have used Word-press which automatically loads latest data in the App. We allowed sharing by using SocialSharing plugin available on Phonegap.
Result
The development of the mobile app showed the following results
- The Users of the organization can search for the jobs of their interest easily and can upload their CV and update their profiles.
- Communication channels enable with the solution resulted in making the registered users on top of all the latest news in the organization and users can connect to other members of same domain as well.
- The user can register for On Demand and Upcoming Webinars.
- A satisfied Client, as concluded from the remarks of Mr. Brian Parsanka ,Digital Strategist & Project Manager at The Officers' Association, who says “Many thanks to our development and programming partners at ShoNet and Astrea, we couldn't have achieved this so smoothly without them.“