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How one university created a purpose-built, research collaboration platform in less than seven months

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CLIENT Leading Research University

INDUSTRY Higher Education & Scientific R&D

BUSINESS SIZE Large Enterprise (Multi-stakeholder, high-grant environment)

SOLUTIONS Bespoke Research Collaboration & Knowledge Platform

 

The Client

La Trobe University is one of Australia’s leading public universities

and has been transforming people and societies for more than 50 years.
The Challenge

For more than a decade, Australia’s tertiary institutions

benefited from access to AARNet’s Cloudstor, a purpose-built platform that provided academics with the ability to store, manage and collaborate on research data online. However, due to a changing market and “lack of viability”, AARNet announced it would decommission Cloudstor by the end of 2023. Realising the urgent need for a replacement, La Trobe University partnered with Innovior to explore alternative solutions that would leverage cloud native technology, tools and applications.
The Solution

Innovior conducted an intensive discovery phase to gain a clear understanding

of what the client’s staff wanted from a potential solution. While essentially aiming to build a like-for-like platform to replace the capability of Cloudstor, it realised there was an opportunity to expand on its offering by identifying additional features and ways of improving usability. A five-week Requirements Gathering Exercise considered many factors including security, scalability, integration, governance, compliance and interoperability.

Based on their findings, Innovior and La Trobe decided to incorporate three highly regarded platforms as the core building blocks of the solution – Service Now, Power Platform and SharePoint. While the latter is an incredibly rich collaboration platform, the focus was on creating a bespoke experience that reduces the complexity and alleviates the laborious rigor of core daily tasks for researchers. This was achieved by seamlessly bringing the three pieces of technology together from a coding, automation and user experience perspective.

With a laser focus on user experience, Innovior recruited the help of an experienced UX designer,  who worked closely with the project team to define process flows and design a user interface that provides seamless, intuitive and easy integration.  This resulted in a fully interactive prototype that allowed La Trobe to experience the application interfaces and process flows before a single line of code was committed.
The Results

Within seven months of engagement and well ahead of schedule

Innovior has delivered La Trobe University with a purpose-built solution of its own. Invio, as it has been named, brings together three extremely well-known, well-architected and stable platforms in a seamless manner to ensure minimal risk. Key functional and non-functional elements include:

Greater control: research teams can manage their sites and assign permissions externally as required

Security: the architecture separates directories for internal and external collaborators and applies a highly protected posture to SharePoint

Governance: Service Now is leveraged to manage tickets and provide authorisation processes that are tracked centrally 

Centralised admin dashboard: provides easy management of users, groups, permissions, storage and alerts

Capability to leverage Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP natively: to conduct bulk uploads and supporting application processes (provided through a 3rd party platform)

Leveraging Azure: cloud-native security and application components that aligns with Microsoft best practice

Data migration: aligned with the migration tools offered by AARNET, we are designing a data migration ETL process that will help to extract existing data from SharePoint, maintaining data structures, metadata and customising SharePoint as required.


As Invio’s owner, La Trobe University has the ability to extend and develop on top of the solution, while a managed service offering will provide the option to use Invio for a monthly fee that includes contemporary support services that are not only flexible but scales with an evolving user base.

“Invio represents a leap forward. It not only caters to our present but is also geared for the future; giving us greater control, unparalleled security and streamlined governance. Invio is not just a platform but a testament to what can be achieved when technology aligns perfectly with institutional needs.” 

Chris Rathborne
Director - Applications & Platforms, La Trobe University

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