Washington State's Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction has awarded Ramp Group the contract to upgrade its K-12 Website, announced Terry Drayton, a managing partner of Ramp Group.
"Washington State is a leader in implementing innovative, responsive technology solutions," said Drayton, "and so we are very pleased to work with them on this exciting project. Most of us are parents of children in Washington's public schools and regularly use the WASL information provided by the Website, which adds an important personal element to this project for us."
"The existing State's Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction Website was launched in _____ and serves as the primary information source for Washington schools," said Superintendent Dr. Terry Bergeson. "Our Website attracts millions of visitors who view hundreds of thousands of documents. We had extensive feedback from our constituencies that it was no longer meeting all of their needs so it was time to update and upgrade it. Our goal in engaging Ramp Group is to create an exemplary Website that will truly connect and enrich the relationships between students, parents, educators, community members and legislators with each other, with state-level resources and with the important work being done in Washington schools."
Ramp Group is creating an interactive site in which the various constituencies of the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction's Website will be able to quickly and effectively tap relevant information from a myriad of sources. The information on the Website comes from memos, guidelines, sample tests, interactive resources and directives, as well as information from state wide tests, such as WASL results and statistics.
"Ramp Group was selected for this project because they had proven experience in both Website design and custom development and brought those together in a very compelling bid. We were impressed by their team and the processes they use to get high quality results for their clients. Since the project began, they have exceeded our expectations," said Dr. Bergeson.
The site will be implemented using powerful state-of-the-art technologies from Microsoft in order to make the varied content immediately available to users from a single interface. Workflow to support content creation, approval and publishing needed for the Website is also being implemented using Windows Workflow Foundation. Key products include Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007, Microsoft SQL 2005, .NET 2.0, C# and Microsoft SQL Reporting Services.
"When parents want to see how their child's WASL score stacks up or a teacher is looking for up-to-date resources on learning standards, they need to get there in just a click or two," explained Drayton. "And all the users of this site will want to be able to accomplish a wide range of tasks-from highly refined searches to online applications."
The information housed on the site will be vast, so building a highly reliable content management system is integral to the project. "One of the things Ramp Group is known for is our ability to create systems that reliably manage data measured in terabytes a day," said Drayton. Ramp Group's clients include Microsoft, Amazon, Coinstar and other leading organizations. The company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a Certified Integrator to Amazon Web Services.
The project began in early February with focus group testing and requirements gathering. Initial designs were prepared and tested with the various constituencies. With that feedback, the design was finalized and is now entering the development phase. The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction's new K-12 Website is expected to launch this summer before the 2007 WASL results are released.
Established in 2000 and headquartered in Bellevue, Ramp Group helps clients grow by delivering highly usable, commercial-grade applications including Websites, internal business applications, ad management, content management and business intelligence solutions. For more information, visit the company's Website at www.rampgroup.com.