Jarvus Innovations

The challenge

Connecting students and alumni is critical for fostering a powerful community for schools. When a sense of community between alumni and students is strong, it provides networking opportunities for students past and current, and fundraising opportunities for the school. With so many ways to connect to communities in the modern age Wharton needed a way to preserve the student\alumni relationship as a powerful tool in the information age.

The project

Jarvus has partnered with Masce and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to build mobile applications for the school. The most prominent project, Wharton Connect, was originally built to help develop alumni social events, but has since grown to support all students of Wharton past and present. Wharton connect has become an extremely powerful networking tool for Wharton alumni to connect, organize, and stay in touch. The Wharton Connect portal offers school information, news, student and faculty directories, class notes, study room availability and reservations, and resource and event listings for undergraduate students.

Approach

Connect was deployed natively, and on the web to provide a fluid experience between mobile apps and the web interface. Jarvus worked closely with Wharton IT to document their APIs and empower Wharton’s IT force to own and control Wharton connect. The documentation generated is now used to build specifications, provide sample files, discuss issues, and manage API subscriptions and updates on all API builds.

Development

Masce designed the app using interactive wireframe, and Jarvus developed and implemented this vision to bring it to life. By developing Wharton Connect with the Sencha Touch with Cordova platform Jarvus was able to support both iOS and Andorid with support for additional platforms in the future as needed. Maintaining a single code base has saved Wharton 50% of their development costs over the last three years. Jarvus has continued to add features and tweak Wharton Connect to support Wharton’s users.

Business logic and strategy

Wharton provided all business logic and backend API systems for the Wharton Connect application. Jarvus provided recommendations regarding testing, monitoring, maintenance, and hosting to ensure every user was getting the best possible experience from the application.