Pilot in use
The employee portal launched and supported the decision to continue.
Public Sector · Education administration
Rebuilding education portals when the rules live in old code
An IT services partner and Shinetech replaced aging education portals by recovering undocumented rules, proving the approach in an employee portal, and extending it to other user groups.
The business context
The old system was also the only detailed description of the work.
A public education authority needed to replace aging portals while retaining the business behavior accumulated over years of use. Employees, families, students, job applicants, and administrators had different tasks, but all depended on rules embedded in the existing applications.
Shinetech worked through the authority’s IT services partner. There was no requirements document comprehensive enough to guide a straightforward rebuild. The team had to recover behavior from old application code and database procedures, then turn it into working replacements that the client could review.
System view
A familiar task in a rebuilt portal
A fictional employee-record task illustrates the portal’s role-specific form experience. Fields and values are illustrative; this is not the authority’s interface. View full-size interface (new tab)
The operating challenge
A familiar screen could hide a difficult-to-reach business rule.
Some workflows required complicated configuration and carefully prepared data before they could even be exercised in the old system. That made validation harder than comparing the appearance of two pages. A path that was rarely reached could still contain a rule essential to the business.
Compatibility problems added another layer: dependencies used by the older system did not all fit the new application stack. The team had to understand the behavior being preserved while investigating what needed to change underneath it.
The delivery decisions
Use one internal portal to establish the method.
Start with a bounded employee portal
The first portal served internal users and had a more manageable scope. It gave the team a place to prove data access, rule recovery, and the new application approach before extending the work across the wider portal estate.
Recover behavior before replacing it
Developers traced rules through the old code and stored procedures. Hard-to-trigger paths required deliberate configuration and test-data preparation. This work made the existing system a source of behavior to verify, rather than a collection of screens to imitate.
Extend the approach through reviewed releases
After the employee portal, the team moved into parent, student, and career services, along with administrator tools. Daily coordination and client code review kept the delivery partner involved in progress, requirements, and acceptance as the scope expanded.
How the workflow holds together
A successful pilot gave the next portal a better starting point.
Prove the replacement method
The employee portal established that the team could recover rules and deliver a replacement that went into use. Subsequent portals benefited from that experience, while still requiring their own workflow analysis. The reuse was in the method and technical foundation, not an assumption that every role did the same work.
The delivered scope also included accessibility improvements and single sign-on for administrators. These supported the different ways employees, families, students, applicants, and administrators interacted with the replacement portals. Each new portal still required its own rules to be understood and reviewed.
The delivered result
A pilot became a replacement program across the portal estate.
Broader delivery
Parent, student, and career portals followed, together with administrator tools.
Usability work
Accessibility improvements and administrator single sign-on formed part of the delivered scope.
The employee portal established the first working replacement. Parent, student, career, and administrator applications extended the delivery before the engagement concluded.
Case taxonomy
Searchable by industry, technology, product, and business need.
Industry and product
- Public Sector
- Education administration
- Government portals
Technology and delivery
- Web application
- Java
- Legacy modernization
- Phased delivery
Business need
- Business-rule recovery
- Accessibility
- Administrator SSO
- Role-based portals
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