Abenaki Analytics Went the No-Code Route for Building Their Athena College Tool to Help Higher Education Management
The Challenge
Athena College is Abenaki Analytics' latest project which is an integrated financial and strategic planning simulation, designed for educational purposes. They wanted to publish this tool on the web to allow faculty members and students access it in a collaborative environment.
"As a university administrator, my perspective was the entirety of the institution, and bringing people together to focus in on the complexity of administering a university, the cause-and-effect relationships. This seemed to me like an exercise that would be helpful to get people more attuned to what it takes to manage a university or college in a way that is strategically sound and sustainable over time. This application was designed as an educational tool for that purpose.”
The Solution
This higher education tool was in its proof of concept phase, so Steve did not want to go all-in, and create a custom application. With SpreadsheetWeb, Abenaki Analytics could capitalize on their Excel knowledge, and convert this workbook into a web application within days, not months. The calculation logic comes from the underlying workbook they had already built, and no coding knowledge was necessary to publish it on the web.
“I approached the developer that I used in my last project and basically, they gave me a proposal for a full-blown application, using cutting edge technology, along the lines with what I had done before with them. However, I was not ready for that this time, because this is an unproven product.”
The Results
With additional features like the ability to save data, create and manage users, and define user roles to allow limited access in the system, the Athena College tool can now be utilized by higher education institutions as a collaborative environment. Users can share notes and compare their data, all behind a secure platform. It took zero coding.
“It was incredibly easy to convert the tool into a web application. The process was smooth beyond my expectation. I had a working application in the matter of a couple of days. It just blew me away. If I went with my original developer from my last product, it would have been in the range of tens of thousands of dollars to build the application.”
