In this blog article, we look at the state of things with higher education mobile app ecosystem within the Sungard/Ellucian Banner digital campus family and how it will define the choices for the education institutes that rely on its services.
The Banner by Ellucian product powers many higher education institutes throughout the world. Services such as Student management, Course management, Relationship management, finance, human resources and LDAP are part of the platform. Perficient has executed multiple projects around the Banner/Ellucian platform, helping institutions create customized mobile apps targeting large student communities .
Current State
The current Ellucian Mobile Connection product provides the starting basis of many university mobile apps. The Mobile Connection product is based on the Rhodes framework by RhoMobile. RhoMobile is an open source framework written in Ruby on Rails, which enables cross-platform mobile app development leveraging HTML5 and and in-app ruby virtual machine (RVM).
The objective of Mobile Connection was to provide ability for the higher education institutes to quickly offer mobile apps to the students, faculty and staff without needing to custom write apps for each platform from scratch.
The initial versions of the Mobile Connection also included a Groovy on Grails based framework on top of the Banner Oracle database for realtime access to student, course, schedule and related data. The app also integrated with the Luminis LDAP server for authentication and authorization. The Groovy on Grails server provides RESTful APIs serving JSON data, which are consumed by the RoR client inside the mobile app. As part of our implementations, we extended this framework to create many additional web services including ability to push notifications to mobile apps.
The mobile app was easy to customize with the look and feel of the specific institution and also enabled adding custom applets within the app. The look and feel customization was achieved via custom HTML and CSS and graphics for the institute.
However, due to the complex architecture of the Rhodes framework, the mobile app demonstrated lag time issues and upon initial hallway usability testing, the students noticed this as well. Also, given the fact that the campus-wide wifi network was not very speedy, the overall user experience suffered.
Forward thinking educational institutes want to meet and exceed student expectations and provide mobile tools for them to be successful. However, the technology decision makers in those institutes are increasingly faced with challenges:
- No clear mobile roadmap
- Complexity and cost of delivering mobile app solutions
- Speed of evolving mobile services
- Fragmented experiences between departments
For institutions leveraging Elucian solutions, the least risky path was to follow their recommendation and adopt the Rhodes based approach.
However, as noted in the Ellucian roadmap, this approach ran into some landmines. The RhoMobile solution was purchased by Motorola with had a different idea for its future. It became increasingly clear that Motorola was interested in commercializing the package and make it a freemium offering with advanced features only available in the premium subscription.
The technical concerns related to performance and usability never really disappeared in the Rhodes platform. In addition, the team had to troubleshoot the open source platform for bugs and enhancements, since the official releases would lag behind the frequent mobile OS updates both in iOS and Android platforms.
As Ellucian’s own roadmap states “Long-term future of Open Source Rho is unclear. Ellucian, our clients, and partners risk standardizing on an out-of-date and/or uncompetitive open source mobile platform”.
Future State
Where does this leave the current mobile apps built around Ellucian’s Mobile Connection?
It is clear that Ellucian is moving away from this Rhodes based framework. Their current roadmap is to provide a different hybrid solution that they control, for general availability around March 2013.
Their strategy is to eliminate platform risk by owning the entire value chain of the mobile platform solution. This strategy eliminates dependency on open source frameworks in a fast moving domain. The new architecture is a hybrid solution, albeit much more lightweight than the Rhodes framework.
Also the new user experience seems to be taking cue from other popular mobile app UX patterns such as dynamic navigation, expandable menus and bottom tabs. The new solution will allow both a Shared download app model as well as a fully branded institution app download.
The promised solution also includes ability to create builds and deployment via the Cloud which could be attractive to institutions that want to quickly try things out without needing to invest in an environment.
Conclusion
It is clear that the new Ellucian platform is focusing on performance and usability while reducing the dependencies on external frameworks which are subject to acquisition and shifts in priorities. This is a good development, however, it remains to be seen how well the new platform delivers on its promises.
It is apparent that building mobile apps with a single platform tie in may have its disadvantages for higher institutions. However, the investment in a robust server side API infrastructure will not go to waste in the long term.
Further reading:
1. Ellucian Mobile Platform – http://www.ellucian.com/Solutions/Ellucian-Mobile/
2. Ellucian Roadmaps – http://www.ellucian.com/Roadmaps/ (the mobile strategy has both the PowerPoint PDF as well as the Webex recording playback).
