Creating Communication Chat

Vigilo’s daycare software simplifies administration in schools and kindergartens as well as provides for better communication between parents, school administrators and teachers.

Their child care management app allows for better daycare management, ensures good follow-up, managing schedules and generally allows for parents to play more of an active role in their children’s education.

Since Vigilo is all about connecting parents, schools and children together, they were looking to create a chat inside their mobile child care app where parents could communicate with each other and the teachers as well. They also wanted to have a separate teacher communication chat. Vigilo asked Softwarium to create a chat from scratch that satisfied their business requirements and the needs of their customers.

We started with creating a database that could store all of the messages. All messages needed to be stored and retrieved quickly. This meant that we needed to choose the proper Database Management System (DBMS) and how to design all of the tables to store the messages. Since tens of thousands of people would use this database it must be able to store such a volume of conversations and all of the messages contained inside. Furthermore, the database needed to be scalable since more users would be added as time went on.

Overall, the chat must be comfortable for the customers to use and we needed to create our own concept of how the chat would look like. Our initial vision was to allow users to create an event or a topic for discussion and everyone could comment in this thread. We presented the initial product to Vigilo and they released the product for the customers to try out.

After collecting feedback from their customers, Vigilo asked Softwarium to rework the design of the chat following the feedback obtained from the end-users. Vigilo wanted the chat to resemble popular instant messaging services such as Facebook Messenger where one person sends a message and the other person views it and sends a reply. The file structure needed to look something like this:

Since the users already started using the previous version and had messages stored inside, we needed to migrate all of the data to the new version without taking the old one offline. All of this was seamlessly done in one month. Since everything was done inflight, we needed to validate the databases to make sure everything was transferred correctly i.e. each conversation correlated with the right user. This involved creating a validating application to compare the source and destination for discrepancies and inconsistencies.

In the end, all of the data was transferred without loss or corruption. Also, we had rigorous security measures in place to ensure that the data remained secure during the migration. Both Vigilo and their customers were very happy with the end product and the childcare management chat is used today to connect everybody involved with the educational process.