Visual WebGui Case Studies

"At first I considered building a straight Ajax website to deliver the next version of MTO. But after running into Visual WebGui it was a “no brainer”.  It brings the desktop to the web. Just what my users need." Gehres Weed 

Overview
Konbrio Software is owned and operated by Gehres Weed. Other than some undergraduate computer science courses most of Gehres Weed's professional experience has been in the music education field, public and private. Opening a music retail store and music school led Gehres to start managing teachers, their schedules, registration and payroll. After a while it became apparent that some automation was required. "After scouring the web for an acceptable solution I found none," said Gehres and continued "I dusted off the programming books and got to work. Eventually I ended up with a LAN version of Music Teacher's Office (MTO). It saves us about 30 – 40 hours of admin time each month."

Music Teacher's Office handles the "business" end of music lessons, allowing teachers teach the students. All the administration steps that happen before a student leaves his first lesson is what Music Teacher's Office does for the teacher.

All the maintenance and iterations of MTO over the years got Gehres to get more and more into the software business, building web sites and windows applications and they started to market it. But for the average music teacher or music school admin, the original solution was just too complicated as they needed to set up a local area network with a file server, then download the program, install and keep up with updates.  As a result, a simpler-to-operate solution was needed, and the web was the direction to take since it eliminates the need for local setup and maintaining a network for the novice target audience.

Business needs
Music schools and studios need consistent and professional means to running an efficient music lesson business.  This means that the solution needs to be intuitive and easy-to-use without the hassles of maintaining a network of their own.  With this in mind, Konbrio Software decided to create a web-based application to simplify the administration of music schools and allow teachers to concentrate on teaching by providing an efficient and intuitive system.

It was important to develop an application that most novice computer users would feel comfortable with and at the same time be delivered via the internet. Music Teacher's Office should also fit to most teachers’ or schools' ways of doing business.

The Music Teacher's Office software allows the following tasks:

• Scheduling for lessons and meetings.
• Creating and editing a custom timetable to fit your schedule..
• Creating professional registration forms that are customizable to meet the studio's payments and attendance policies.
• Invoice tracking allowing monitoring students' accounts.
• Parent and student information is recorded during the registration and at your finger tips at all times.
• Lesson Assignments - Assigning, managing and monitoring lessons in a way that lessons are recorded to the database and can be printed or emailed to the students. In addition, previous lessons can easily be viewed at any time to track the student's progress which should improve learning monitoring and reporting and also would provide a huge benefit when a substitute teacher is required.
• Managing attendance log.
• Administration of Teacher's Payroll.

The Solution
Konbrio Software looked for a solution that would allow taking the current Windows version of Music Teacher's Office and offering it as a web application. Straightforward Ajax was considered originally, but seemed to be more complex than expected so Gehres kept looking for alternatives. "At first I considered building a straight Ajax website to deliver the next version of MTO. But after running into Visual WebGui it was a “no brainer”.  It brings the desktop to the web. Just what my users need."

When Gehres discovered Visual WebGui it didn't take too long before he recognized its capabilities for doing exactly what he was looking for - bringing the desktop to the web in a very simple and short process. "Working with VWG at first was a bit quirky, as is any new thing, but if you have any background in VB.NET or C# you can get up to speed fairly fast and create usable products with intuitive and easy-to-use UI allowing web access without the hassles of maintaining a network of their own," said Gehres and added that "I estimate that if I were to build similar functionality into with traditional Ajax platform it would have taken about two years instead of one and not have been as good in the end." The project could have been much shorter as well if Gehres wouldn't have done most of the work himself part-time.

Benefits
By developing a Visual WebGui solution, Konbrio Software was able to provide an application that is easy for the end user to implement and use. Since the new solution is web based there is no need for users to setup a LAN or to download and install the applications.  Deployment of the new Visual WebGui based application is easy and is required only once.

Visual WebGui's unique framework also offered MTO users a familiar environment that maintains a “desktop feel” best suited for MTO’s target audience to smoothly navigate.

In addition to the user experience benefits, Visual WebGui aided Konbrio in the development process by allowing a sole inexperienced web developer to successfuly complete the project in less time than expected. "It (VWG) took a little getting used to but in the long run, it provides a much better development experience and I also found the forums support very helpful and prompt," commented Gehres.

As a result of the success of this project, Gehres plans to use Visual WebGui as much as possible now in Konbrio's day-to-day development. "I often need to build back-end content management type functionality into many websites and VWG really shines in that capacity.  One of the main advantages is that the end user does not have to download or install any plugins like Flash or Silverlight to make this stuff work," he concluded.

Screenshots
Below is a screenshot of the School Defaults Admin form. The Studio defaults form is visible but there are 8 other tabs where other various parameters can be set for each school.

The next shot is the Registration / Invoice form 

Below is a shot of the Parent-student tab in the Registration/Invoice form

Here is the Administration Teacher Payroll form

The next shot is what a teacher would view when he or she first logs in.  From here, he or she would select the student to teach via a context menu and would be taken to the following screen shot.

The last screen shot is what the parent would view when logging in from the website