Update: Espo as After School Reading Program Application

[crmclients]

Hi Everyone!

Hard to believe I haven't posted in almost a year! My 1st Espo client using Espo Cloud has taken off, conquering the limitations of 2020/2021 meeting in person for their 3rd grade, after school reading program for struggling students; they have created

• Over 160 mentors servicing
• Almost 7,000 lessons
  • 4,100 Skills, 1,000 Vocabulary, 1,700 Reading
  • 5,800 Completed, 400 in Draft, 700 New, 80 Started/Not Finished
• For over 250 students
• At 24 schools

since we launched in October 2020.

They have another 100 students in the queue and they have started a program to partner with high school for mentors.

Espo was truly a God-send to help keep their program going after the schools shut down and they could no longer do side-by-side tutoring.

Not yet being a real developer, I reused Cases for Lessons and Knowledge Base Articles for Lesson Attachments. This set up was ideal as each mentor can see the lessons/assessments/word lists that are in progress, completed, and what needs to be done next.

Other re-purposed modules were

• Meetings which became Available Sessions, a list of tutoring sessions (Day/Time/School) the mentors can sign up for
• Tasks which became Books Read - we chose this because for some reason, creating an Event Entity wouldn't display in the side panel where they needed it to show as the bottom panels were making the record pretty long
• Mentors are Portal Users with access to Lessons as Cases, perfect setup as they carry out the Educator's lesson plan to get the 3rd grader to the right reading level

The non-profit has Office365 and use that for calendar, tasks, meetings etc.

I set up the Workflow to trigger emails for when a mentor candidate is created, sending an email to setup their background check process, different email/process for different school districts so we have 3 flows based on the School District field.

What I wish I knew before I started:

• I just found out last week the client should have gotten an email that would have allowed me to download the reports module into my test server! They are still looking for it. We I started back in 2020, I couldn't afford to drop $400 for the advanced pack so I carefully created in production but I really could have used it and can now. Emailing back and forth as the original person I had setup the cloud account is gone.
  • In communicating with Taras, it looks like a dev copy of reports/workflow is not an option for the cloud version beyond 3 months
  • Would like to see some kind of development allowance, as it seems to read in the FAQ, since we are already paying for the cloud version
• Git Hub - i think i remember telecastg talking about their process and i wish I had set it up beforehand - got too busy with my day job and still haven't - really needed but have to table
• That Espo Bitnami would be discontinued - would have saved the installation file somewhere- there are times when I want to try things offline and proof it's no more! I had Espo Bitnami way back on my old laptop which is wiped now - since with the cloud I can only really change things in Administration or with Formulas it would be nice to trial and error offline/non Internet - I have a LAMP stack now but not yet set it up - the One Click Bitnami-Espo was awesome and the stragglers files in cyberspace no longer work
• API coding - if I was better at it, I could get the client off Form Assembly and bring mentor candidates right into Leads; I did get it to work with a WordPress version but they are using Wix and Wix charges astronomically for everything beyond a one page "website" - as a non-profit I am trying to save them money

Issues & Challenges

• Presently, trying to figure out the relationship needed to show the Tasks (Books) on both the Contact (Student) and Case (Lesson) records
• Also, the NPO is needing some more intense reports, (we have about 140 presently) hence my wanting a dev version for the AdvPack; I set them up with something in PowerBI, free for all and since they have O365 also a free web version but if I can do it in Espo, better
  • They want to graph progress e.g. the student comes to them at reading level G = 7 and at the end of the school year they are at M = 13 but their target was K=10, they would like to show all 3 points for each Student
• Teams! - we opted out of teams because of the fluid situation where one mentor my have 2 Students at 2 different Schools and it didn't seem to work out with the default Salesperson, Sales Org CRM setup. We are going to revisit. Any ideas happy to hear!
• There is a timing issue with setting up a mentor candidate in Espo, training them in my development instance, and access to production; I wish it was smoother and we are looking at doing it all in production
• Lots of retired folks so computer skills are very basic, needing to navigate Espo and Zoom and reading sites has been challenging; we start will PC skills in training

To make a long post longer, in case it helps with ideas, the flow goes like this:

• A mentor is added as a portal user and the educator as a user
• An educator creates a lesson with instructions on what the mentor needs to do
• The mentor logs into the portal, reviews the lessons, starts a Zoom session with the student and carries out the lesson which might be reading out loud, assessment test, or other activity
• The mentor notes using the drop-downs progress e.g. too easy, too hard, just right
• The educator later reviews the results and creates the next lesson plan
• Status and sorting helps the mentor find the next lesson, key since it probably is a different mentor or student than before
• URL fields allows they educator to use various resources including reading sties, Google docs, etc.

I want to thank Yuri and team for all the hard work as well as everyone who helped me form this, couldn't have done it without you!

[Kpuc]

Good job man! It's always nice to see someone utilizing Espo for big projects like yours.

Actually I'm also having quite a few sucessful projects with the software. 400+ users, 4-5m records. I'm scaling the instances with a Ryzen 9, 64GB RAM, 2TB NVme server in Hetzner, Litespeed, LSPHP 8.0, everything working as a charm.

Don't forget to pay for the extensions in order to support the project.

[crmclients]

400 users that's awesome! I started in 2020 when no job could be had, getting back on my feet now in 2022 gas here is $5.95 a gallon -

Btw, the Cloud version is $5,700 a year in our current configuration so hoping that helps.

Happy to help others with how-did-you questions. Glad to see others having much success!

[item]

Hello crmclients,
if i understand, you have make somethink like "moodle" ?

[crmclients]

Hello item!
Not quite but I understand the connection

This config it's more of a lesson administration and progress tracker whereas Moodle is a fairly robust LMS (learning mgmt sys) where students login to take courses and can self enroll in Moddle.

So for this Espo config, it's only mentors and educators using Espo to create lessons and track reader progress.

The 3rd graders need 1-on-1 teaching, a lot of reading out loud and assessment tests where it's important to watch the student at each question, struggling to sound it out or not, that sorta thing. There are no autonomous activities and no classroom, always customized for the students current reading level. These are 3rd graders reading at a 2nd sometimes 1st grade level that got pushed on but can't really read.

I setup Moodle way back when I was teaching Prj Mgmt and found it to be extremely time consuming, (and actually demoed it to them along with Espo and Sugar, etc.) It's a great system but for this NPO, the physical books and the links to reading sites with already have approved content especially created for reading, so they use Espo for tracking the progress of lessons, mentor attendance, and contact directory for teacher, mentors, and students. It would be a lot to re-create or cut/paste, etc.

We are capturing starting, current, and ending reading level to assist with funding, showing progress, etc. and Moodle could have helped with that however it would be the mentor typing in the info in the same fields created in Espo (not the student) so Espo works just a well for this.

We want to do something with Donors but they have a free Salesforce instance which affords them all the gateway processing. I was looking to re-use the Sales/Order module since they don't "sell" anything but not sure if that will happen as the plugin for SF is convenient to take donations from their website and for events.

[item]

Hello crmclients,
really happy for you who have do something like and have gratitude of users. this is the most important i think for me.

recently, my boss send me
"You gave us a CRM, facilitated and improved our procedures. If we ask you something, it is never too much for you, you think along with us, you think of things that we don't think of, you correct, adjusts where necessary"
i don't think he send me this message if i use another crm than espocrm

if i try to match ours crm with yours :
60 school
200 mentors
200000 lessons/month
2000 student/month
60 meeting/month for mentors
100 cases/month
200 diploma/month

and many other issue

Regards

[crmclients]

Very great accomplishment item! Looks like you have a lot of activity with 200,000 lessons! Awesome job...