Online Learning Platform for Accountants

  • Educational platform that provides up-to-date content and developments important to the accounting industry.
  • Web-portal with an integration with Salesforce.com for content management and administration.
  • Integrated payment system to allows users to continue their education and obtain credits with ease.

Expertise

Content & Document Management, Integrations, Web and Enterprise Portals, ELearning & Online Training

Verticals

Banking & Finances, Education

CPAAcademy.org

CPAacademy.org creates leaders in the accounting industry by providing high quality continuing education for Certified Public Accounts that is easy to access. Software Allies has worked together with CPAAcademy.org to create a robust platform that offers webinars, self study options, and more to both new and experienced CPAs.

Duration

60 months

Team Composition

1 Project Manager, 2 Ruby on Rails Developer, 1 Salesforce Developer, 1Tester

Technologies

HTML5, Heroku, Javascript, Rails, Salesforce

Description

Our customer —CPAAcademy.org— offers an easy to use platform for knowledge sharing and idea exchange through the marketing and presenting of the most up-to-date educational content and developments important to the accounting industry. By leveraging Heroku, Ruby on Rails, and Salesforce.com, we have helped them build a platform to support over 40,000 certified public accountants and growing.

Business Goals

  • To create a platform that provides CPAs access to online learning materials and accounting industry news.
  • To ensure the platform is scalable and robust enough to support thousands of CPAs for their continuing education.
  • To easily manage content, including webinars and self-study courses.
  • To have a marketing platform to create and grow the online community of instructors and CPAs and to notify users of upcoming webinars, courses and news.

Solution

  • Software Allies took over development of the CPAAcademy.org platform in its early stages. Some ground work had been laid on the Salesforce.com platform along with a basic Ruby on Rails application and integration with Salesforce. The application needed to be upgraded and important practices like test driven development were not being used. The application and integration to Salesforce.com was not reliable and need to be improved. Software Allies has since implemented TDD, upgraded the version of Rails, create a robust and reliable integration, and added many new features, like Self Study. The CPAAcademy.org platform has since grown to support over 40,000 CPAs.
  • With that many users relying on the platform for their continuing education, there was much work to be done to ensure the platform worked efficiently and was highly available. The Software Allies team refactored code and created new solutions to optimize the Heroku application. Monitoring tools like New Relic were implemented to better support the site and respond quickly to any problems. The development process was also refined to ensure that new features could be developed and implemented more quickly and with lower costs. Without reliable cloud technologies, the platform could not have supported the community that exists today.
  • Salesforce.com is heavily integrated with the site to support marketing efforts, user & webinar administration, content management, and more! The content, webinars, participants, registrations, and more are contained in Salesforce and a bidirectional integration keeps the Heroku application in sync. Over 100 instructors can create their own webinars and produce content frequently.
  • Salesforce.com houses all contact information for participants and potential leads allowing CPAAcademy.org to integrate with third party marketing tools. Contacts can easily be made aware of upcoming webinars and events, as well as new content that pertains to them. CPAAcademy.org is also able to grow their online community with email marketing, social media, and more by using the Salesforce.com5 platform.

Customer Feedback

"Software Allies does an amazing job supporting my website. There team is always available, quick to respond, and creates quality solutions for my business.”

- Scott Zarret, President

Coming soon

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