CMR Institute was changing their business to remain competitive and open new markets in an industry that is rapidly moving from a physical delivery model to an online model. Their business model and systems at the time were designed around physical inventory and delivery of educational materials. To stay competitive and gain market share they needed to define new business processes and systems, as well as migrate their existing customers to those new systems.
CMR identified key issues during the design of this system, including:
- Defining the new processes and systems that would support their business model
- B2B process for purchase orders
- B2B process for learning management system integration
- Customer service support process for students
- Credit card processing
- Support for a highly dynamic array of business rules for each customer
- Flexible curriculum and content management system
- Ensuring side by side operation of current systems and the new system
- Migrating existing customers without business interruption
- Integrating the financial system
- Supporting customers around the world with near 24x7 operation
To address the issues above CMR embarked on a corporate reorganization of both process and systems and chose Ironworks as the implementation partner. To address their most significant needs, a new e-Learning platform was implemented using SharePoint 2007, Commerce Server 2007, and the SharePoint Learning Kit to deliver SCORM content. To manage the content and track the student curriculum, they developed a new registrar’s office capable of managing each of their corporate customers and tracking all of the students as they progressed through their respective education pursuits.
This system is a .net application built on top of SharePoint 2007, Commerce Server 2007, BizTalk 2006 and the SharePoint Learning Kit with a custom SQL database. Integration with each of their customers is accomplished via BizTalk. This integration provides both B2B purchasing and integration with their learning management systems. Individual students and managers at their corporate clients can also use the web site to place orders.
To meet the high availability and scalability requirements, the system architecture was scaled out. SQL Server was implemented using an active / active cluster on 64 bit enterprise SQL server 2005. This provided the back bone to the rest of the system architecture. The BizTalk Servers were scaled out to provide both fault tolerance and fail over. The front end web servers running Commerce server, SharePoint and the SLK were load balanced across multiple servers to ensure that from end to end the solution didn’t have a single point of failure.