Foundation dedicated to improving student achievement uses Microsoft Azure to create cloud-based school and community dashboards

Customer Overview

Every child, every step of the way, from cradle to career. That is the mission of KnowledgeWorks - a nonprofit foundation that works with school districts and communities across the country to improve student success from pre-K through college.

Situation

A vital part of the KnowledgeWorks philosophy is measuring, reporting and monitoring student progress to identify for the communities the weakest links in the process and opportunities for improvement.

Initially, the collection of data and the creation of reports were effort intensive and time consuming tasks. Reports were produced and delivered in a bound glossy paper format. As KnowledgeWorks grew and expanded into more communities across the country it was difficult for the hardcopy report delivery process to scale with it. Secondarily, a web based "visual" charting tool with drill down and analytics was critical.

KnowledgeWorks decided they needed a new cloud-based solution to streamline the data collection process, to provide a compelling user experience, and to quickly scale to service new communities and school districts. KnowledgeWorks created an RFP that described their situation and their vision. They sent the RFP to various systems integrators requesting that each provide a recommendation for a cloud based solution.

Solution

Cardinal Solutions recommended a Microsoft Azure based solution for the new KnowledgeWorks business analytics solution. The KnowledgeWorks leadership committee selected Cardinal and the Azure platform for a variety of reasons including: cost, scalability, and the availability of world class development and administrative tools.

The two new KnowledgeWorks offerings - Community Impact Report Card and Student Success Dashboard - are being developed and deployed in Azure platform as a service using SQL Azure, Azure reporting services, Azure Portal, TFS 2012, and VS 2012.