Welcome to Uniconnex

Educonnex is a student-centric, school-wide platform specifically designed to integrate, enable, automate and streamline the school environment for the entire school community. It empowers schools to operate more efficiently and effectively, mitigating barriers to growth and the challenges associated with managing and aligning a diverse school community with varied needs and aspirations.

In the design of Educonnex, an effort has been made to ensure each process is streamlined by the correct alignment of technology, information and human resources. The focus of the design of Educonnex is the close integration of workflow, communications and process control between teams within the school – in particular, the leadership team, information communication and technology team, heads of learning areas, teaching staff, as well as the administration and finance teams.

Educonnex addresses each of the areas of functional processes required by most schools as a part of the day to day operation.

Importantly, the Educonnex solution also provides ‘out of the box’ capabilities for the ‘external-facing portal’ and ‘mobile app’, both shown as a “must” for today’s school Technology Requirements.

In addition, apart from Educonnex being able to send email and SMS messages the system also has the ability to generate push notification messages, via the Educonnex Mobile App, to facilitate communications between the school and families, providing an alternative to costly SMS messaging.

As is to be expected, the Educonnex solution has an industry-standard API that can, if you wish to be used, to provide bi-directional and uni-directional integration with 3rd party packages such as an electronic payment gateways and other services provided by specialised vendors.

Best of Breed Functionality

Educonnex offers multiple capabilities supporting a broad range of education-specific functionality. It is a cloud-based platform that seeks to bring the best practice to school administration. Rather than recreating generalist software applications (for example, accounting, HR, etc.) within the Educonnex application, the bi-directional Educonnex API enables Schools to integrate with best of breed specialist solutions of the school’s choice in the one homogeneous solution.

By utilising this approach, Educonnex is focused on extending advanced academic administration functionality and leverages best of breed specialists to continue to bring their developments in their fields into practice at the school. CountryNet believes this approach provides the optimum technology environment that is continually evolving to meet the School’s changing requirements.

Accounting is a prime example of how this methodology enhances the long-term efficiency of a school. In a fast-paced world, driven by ever-hastening innovation, accounting solutions are and will remain ever-evolving applications. Rather than trying to recreate these innovations in an accounting module in the Educonnex software, the Educonnex API can allow seamless integration with the School’s chosen financial application complete with the newest functionality. CountryNet invests all development dollars on what it knows and does best, the application that provides unique Intellectual Property for our School partners.

Xero, a recognised best of breed accounting solution (or a school’s choice of another accounting solution), bi-directionally coupled via the Educonnex API with Educonnex’s school billing module, delivers via a single user interface:

through Xero, your school has access to the best of breed, an efficient financial management environment for accountancy tasks, collections, payments, and general accounting; and, access to powerful accounting analytics, automatic bank statement reconciliation, and a robust permissions structure to allow delegation and management of financial transactions and operations; and

through Educonnex, your school has access to school billing functionality purpose-built to manage the specific needs of school billing not catered to within general accounting packages. This functionality includes, but is not limited to:

– sibling discounting;

– combined staff and sibling discounts;

– the ability to create one-off discount categories;

– billing of amounts due to blended, and split, family members as per standing agreements;

– capacity to manage payment of amounts due over payment terms approved by the college.

The above school-specific billing functions are normally recorded and administered via excel spreadsheets and manual records. Educonnex manages these varied billing agreements, as well as generating an account for the individual/s who have agreed to pay the account. This information is then passed to the colleges accounting software for reconciliation and invoicing. This functionality is unique to Educonnex and removes the ongoing manual work (and inherent opportunity for human error) involved in managing and processing these tasks. This provides the college with the opportunity to redirect these human resources to more productive activities.

Omni-Channel Design

Educonnex is a comprehensive School Information and Administration solution that is deployed on a highly scalable, smart-client, cloud-based architecture. It is a truly omni-channel application, rendering user access to the software from any web-enabled device – mobile phone, tablet, laptop, work station, etc. Educonnex is a multi-channel service application that provides the staff member, parent or student with integrated user experience. The user can access Educonnex directly from a desktop or mobile device, or in person at the school and the experience would be seamless.

In the school environment, information and communication are key drivers of academic achievement and community engagement. Educonnex delivers accurate, real-time, information to all community members with information content and access governed by a robust permission architecture. Information is delivered in an omni-channel environment to cater to the diverse needs of a school’s entire community.

System Architecture

Educonnex is the only School Information and Administration System designed to be fully student-centric and is equipped with a flexible foundation. It provides the school with the ability to tailor, expand and evolve the application to meet changing school administration requirements. This foundation includes a set of configuration tools that enables the school to tailor the application, integrate key third-party applications and to enhance operations through additional Educonnex capabilities, consulting and bespoke system design.

The flexibility provided by this design eliminates costly and management-intensive customisations required by legacy systems and accelerates the school’s ability to tailor the application to match the school’s unique business needs. It also ensures that the solution will evolve easily and smoothly without the need to employ costly third-party resources and consulting services.

Future State Organisation Wide

The Educonnex platform is designed to automate and streamline processes with a comprehensive information interface accessible to all community members. Educonnex is underpinned by a unique robust, and tailorable permissions structure that effectively drives operational effectiveness while ensuring operational governance requirements are maintained at all times. The foundation of Educonnex is an architecture that adapts to, and supports, the complex demands of a modern educational institution.

End-User Experience

By definition, most ‘legacy’ education administration systems were designed 15-20 years ago. A legacy system will be characterised by the use of outdated technology and now defunct software standards and approaches. The result is often a cumbersome, clunky and hard to use software that fails to meet modern standards of security, user-friendliness and accessibility. In many cases, end-users simply don’t use them at all, or only in part.

Educonnex offers an entirely new and modern omni-channel user experience, delivered with an intuitive user interface and navigation tools that improve school community member collaboration, communication, and work-flow.

CountryNet Software designed the end-user environment for an entirely new generation of users that demand more – a greater level of simplicity and an improved ability to collaborate in a team environment easily and with full authority over the information and processes for which they are responsible regardless of which area of the school the staff member is working, or which campuses they are physically located.

Educonnex creates a community where members (students, parents, staff, etc.) have the ability, subject to the school’s roles and permissions structure, to view and edit information within Educonnex in real-time.

As a simple, but common example, parent Sally Jones has just got a new mobile phone number. Sally has been granted the required permission by the college Educonnex enables Sally to log into Educonnex and update her mobile number online, as well as any other outdated information, simply and easily.

Being a self-service, online, real-time platform this means a staff member’s time has not been taken up handling a simple, mundane task. Mrs. Jones also had the benefit of updating the school’s records at her convenience. If Mrs. Jones needed to be urgently contacted by the school for any reason, even minutes after the change, her new mobile number would be available.

The single comprehensive database at Educonnex’s foundation means that the end-user is in control of the information that they want to view, the way that they want to view it, and through what interface they view the information. Educonnex has the capacity to upload students, and all school community members, photos for simple and easy identification. This functionally is particularly useful for roll marking, medical incidents/treatment, and off-campus excursions.

Educonnex delivers the ability for an authorised user to create, view, print, and distribute customised reports via a sophisticated interface with drag and drop functionality that interrogates Educonnex’s SQL Database. The end-user can create and save as many custom reports as they require for future access to the same report data.

Educonnex simplifies the end-user experience and delivers control and improves their ability to be more effective and spend more time working in areas where their efforts will create greater educational outcomes. A good example would be the common task of locating a school community member’s details. Our search query allows searches via countless individual or combined parameters as seen below.

Search parameters can also be saved by the user for feature use to save time.

The daily task of absence notification to parents and the parent’s response back to the school becomes a simple seamless process for both school and parents using the Educonnex mobile app.

Educonnex contains full and customisable school community communication functionality catering for communication via:

SMS;

email; and

a costless push notification function via the Educonnex Mobile App.

All community members enjoy self-service functionality, in line with permissions set by your school to meet your individual needs and requirements. Within this self-service (or staff use functionality) parents can select their preferences regarding communication needs e.g. push notifications for urgent absence and medical communications, SMS or Email for any non-urgent communications.

Our belief is Educonnex provides the most adaptive, easy to use, and intuitive school community platform available, bringing the very best of current technology to the 21st Century school. CountryNet operates in a continuous improvement environment driven by new technology, user needs, and user feedback so new releases are part of our everyday activities. Being cloud-based, the deployment of these pre-tested releases is seamless to your school community.

Scalability

Educonnex has been created with a single database design to accommodate large groups of School campuses and physical locations. The requirements for any potential future growth in terms, additional campuses and increased school community numbers are well catered for by the Educonnex platform.

There is no need to configure and manage multiple screens for each process, multiple databases, or separate platforms for each.