was the pilot institution where we rectified and brought up complete error free software in 2019
With its limited staff, CM College suffered to streamline Administration and Academic works, computers are used only for accounting softwares and university purposes, all college activities carried out in papers. Hiring more employees is not a good idea to manage clerical works, management thinks it is inefficient and expensive. By shifting to EMBASE Pro Suits, the staff now spends less time in the office work and more time devoted to the students they serve.
With a staff of 2, the Administration department at CM College resources are quite limited. “We can cover lots of things, but we don't have the expertise in any one area,” says Nasar Perambra, the Princiapal at CM College. “Much of our staff is made up of IT generalists, so it’s difficult to make a good solution great.” The college had been using many on premise tools but as needs grew and issues became more complicated and costly.
Nasar Perambra, Principal, CM College
“We turned to the EMBASE Pro Suits,” says Muhammed Uvaise TK. “In most cases, it has been the best answer.” Since 2009, CM College has used Computer and different tools that are MS Excel for students fees collection and report generation, MS word for Certificates issuing. First came the transition to Certificates, and that, says Muhammed Uvaise TK, Office Clerk , “We want to transform MS Word template to auto generating Transfer certificate with advanced technology like QR code Identification and needed to show students details and take the print out from the EMBASE Pro Suits. the rest of campus that it was okay to operate in the cloud.” Both from what he calls a trust standpoint and familiarity and ease with EMBASE Pro Suits, it made sense to stick with EMBASE Pro Suits. “Having existing MS Excel really made it easy for EMBASE Pro Suits team to Migrate entire students, teachers and office staff details to EMBASE Pro Suits, and to delegate access once we spun up services,” he says.
The implementation approach started with minimum modules and services used with existing computers and printers. EMBASE Pro Suits provide a free domain cmc.embase.in with three user login console. one fore students and parents another for teachers and then a main controlling console for administrator. “As we accelerated our cloud-adoption and migration of more user-facing services,” says Muhammed Uvaise Quthubi, “we started working secure cloud environment, done upgrades and migrations. it is resulted in high-availability of data and services which performed better and its boosted college good will among its stack holders, were more redundant and more reliable once migrated to the cloud—something that we could never have achieved on college.”
Over time, “We decided to breaking down Administrative and Academic works and it is becoming more comfortable about a concept that was initially foreign to both teachers and office staff,” he says. “As we broke down each barrier, we made it easier to take the next steps.”
Mr. Uvaise notes that when they first adopted EMBASE v1.0, in 2017, the tools were not well documented. Since then, EMBASE Pro Suits 4.0 which entirely different application compared to the old one and it is an international competing product. however, “the tools are much easier to use, stunning UI/UX(user interface, user experience) design and speed is far better than the old one. EMBASE Pro Suits v4.0 has launched with more modules and 24/7 customer support.”
CM College’s primary challenge involved the big commercial applications they had migrated. Most were designed for the datacenter—and, says Muhammed Uvaise , “in our experience, have not performed well ‘out of the box’ when moved to the cloud. Our biggest hurdle has been the initial configuration of these (not well-documented) settings to optimize the applications for the new opportunities that the cloud provides.”
Yet he adds that their greatest achievement to date actually resulted from that challenge: In July 2017, they implemented ‘Transfer Certificate module then upgraded to fee collection and attendance module.
“A typical deployment in our software meant a risky task that we were not guaranteed to be delivered error free software because of high turn-over rate of professional employees,” he says. “Instead, we purchase a services from Our Staff team Mincetech (in 2017 formed this team called mincetech in our college later become Emdot Mincetech Private Limited in 2019 ) headed by Mr. Firoz K A Assistant Professor Computer Science Department. The team were able to quickly develop various modules and implemented in the college. When bugs arises the team Mincetech quickly act on it and rectified and started works over in a matter of minutes. With the help of Customer Support, we were able to identify a number of settings related to user control (user role based control which enabled organisational structure based data availability and restrictions), and finally which resulted high-availability of informations in our finger tip”.
In the end, they were able to deploy a production environment with “excellent performance and a level of high-availability that we could not have achieved on campus.”
Now the college can run at home with the help of internet connected device. “If we want to collect fees, issue a certificate, getting reports, conduction exams, sending notification and messages everything will be done online” he says. “Better yet, In Covid19 lock down more of our staff working remotely In admission time and EMBASE Pro Suits provided services as needed.”
Above all, Muhammed Uvaise TK has aimed to get the a work out of the old manner of doing and more involved with Student-facing initiatives. “We've certainly crossed a threshold, in that more of our works are hosted in EMBASE Pro Suits Cloud,” he says. “Instead of maintaining servers, replacing failed components, and applying patches, we are now focusing on making our system run more efficiently which results in a more measurable benefit to our teachers, students and parent-users.”
Additionally, features that college users now rely upon—such as excellent performance and high-availability of data—were once far too costly for the college to implement on its own, especially with its limited resources. “With EMBASE Pro Suits, these features are available to us without huge costs, and, in most cases, are just part of the toolset,” he says. “Best of all, the costs are a fraction of what we would have paid on college and all something that can be managed effectively with existing staff and Existing Computers.”
Much progress has been made at CM College, yet more plans are in the works. The college will continue implementing more modules that are available in the EMBASE Pro Suits through aims to explore better, more efficient ways to deliver services to the students.
Muhammed Uvaise Quthubi is pleased to have freed up Administration staff to focus more resources on "Admission and Services process improvement" through electronic workflows, and to make better sense of college data through data reporting and analytics initiatives with college offices. The department has successfully transformed a traditionally internal-facing IT position into “a user-facing technology trainer to empower users with these new tools.” He is eager to see how EMBASE Pro Suits might be used to support this effort.
For now, says Muhammed Uvaise Quthubi, “EMBASE Pro Suits has given us software modules to streamline our administrative and academic problems that we could not have solved on our own”.
Muhammed Uvaise Quthubi , Administrator, CM College
CM College of Arts and Science is an unaided college in Nadavayal, Wayanad district under the CM Centre Madavoor affiliated to University of Calicut. It was established in 2010.
PRODUCTS USED
EMBASE Pro Suits (Lapis Plus)