Client
This is one of the many internal projects for Elinext, a custom software development company. This internal project (like many others) is often a base product that will be used to speed up the development of a related custom product for our clients. We often simplify our work with the help of software developed to tailor our needs, and this project wasn’t an exception.
Project Description
Notification Management is a corporate communication and membership system, designed to improve the efficiency of information sharing through email, Telegram channels, and Telegram groups. Its development was initiated to improve collaboration within the organization.
Key functionalities of the system that had to be achieved eventually:
- Automatic generation of mailing lists and maintaining their accuracy by synchronizing with the latest employee data on the ID Server;
- Ability to adjust automated mailing lists and create manual groups;
- Administrators can moderate access to closed groups, manage requests for entry, and control membership;
- Group participant management and permission assignment, setting different levels of access;
- Users can explore a list of available groups in detail, tracking their novelty, popularity, and trends;
- Users can freely manage their group subscriptions;
- Users can view messages within groups and certain roles have the authority to manage messages, including composition, editing, and deletion.
It is worth noting that some of these functions weren’t included in the MVP version, and only became available to users after the second version release.
Challenges
Elinext as a company was using an outdated system for distributing newsletters to employees that did not provide enough flexibility to accommodate the interests and preferences of the company staff.
With the introduction of Notification Management system, the company aimed to enhance the efficiency of the newsletter distribution process through the implementation of a robust system that provides quick delivering timely information to employees.
The business objectives of implementing a corporate communication and membership system included:
- Saving time for Elinext admins by automatically maintaining employee mailing lists based on their location, position, and interest.
- Avoiding errors by automating and updating mailing lists on time.
- Enhancing employee satisfaction by empowering them to autonomously manage their subscriptions in additional mailings.
- Ensuring the receipt of the most relevant and up-to-date information by employees.
- Increasing efficiency between other Elinext applications through a modular mailing mechanism that other company applications could use.
Process
The development team has chosen the Agile hybrid model (Kanban + Scrum) to complete the project on time. As often happens with internal projects, most of the members of the development team have a third-party workload on other commercial projects,
The chosen strategy and methodology led to the completion of all the project stages to date within the established time frame.
Solution
The app is a well-designed automated corporate communication and membership system that provides a comprehensive platform for quickly delivering timely information to employees without much effort from the admin side.
The user base consists of all employees of the company. There are several groups of users including managers (who have rights to manage mailing lists, groups, and messages), and employees who want to stay updated with all events taking place within the company and receive timely information.
In its 2nd release, users gain access to essential functionalities, providing seamless and effective communication within the company.
Currently, the system consists of ten essential modules.
Module 1: Profile Management
User authorization, logging in and out is possible with the help of this module.
Module 2: Integrations
This module helps with the synchronization of the Accounts and the Vacation Manager database. The Accounts and the Vacation manager both store sensitive employee data. This module ensures data consistency, security, privacy, and real-time updates. The same module also is responsible for integration with the Telegram app.
Module 3: Groups Management
For the system to be effective for employees, one has to group them. This is why this module exists. This module allows automatically generating predefined groups based on specific criteria and displays them in a common list with all other groups, marked as automatic.
Here the admin can edit, and delete groups. This module enables users to view groups and their details, edit, search, filter, and sort them.
Module 4: Group Members Management
This module allows for providing operations regarding group members. One can view group members, add/remove members to the group manually, filter group members, and approve/decline users’ requests for the groups.
Module 5: Message Management
This module allows sending messages to the group, viewing group messages in open/closed groups, editing group messages, searching, sorting, filtering, or deleting group messages.
Module 6: Subscription Management
Module 7: Category Management
This module streamlines the creation, edition, and deletion of categories, ensuring better management of groups.
Module 8: Tags Management
This module streamlines the creation and deletion of tags, ensuring better management of groups. Adding and removing tags from the group are enabled with the help of this module.
Module 9: System Settings
This module helps to initialize a Telegram corporate account of Elinext. With the help of this module, the admins can quickly change the owner of all Telegram groups and channels.
Module 10: Notification Management
This module allows users to be aware of any changes related to them in the system via email notifications.
All the modules were tested manually, no automated tests were used.
Results
We delivered the project within the budget and time frames. The first, MVP stage was completed within three months, release 2 took another 8 months, and now we’re working further on the system.
All official communication is to be carried out through the app and stored there. All Elinext employees can view and manage their subscriptions to mailing lists.
The solution serves as a comprehensive solution for internal corporate communication and timely notification of employees. It serves to increase employee awareness of current events, minimize spam, and enable employees to create communities of interest.
Here is what’s next for Elinext. Notification Management (upon the third release)
- Improvement of the current functionality;
- Message Sync with Email Client: automatically synchronizes messages sent via email from the email client to the respective groups in the system;
- UI/UX improvement for some modules;
- Event Management Module addition that’d allow CRUD events through the app and provide statistics.
