Final project for FEWD
Nothing exists to help international education professionals easily plan professional trips and report on site visits. A few web sites exist for mapping travel, but these are designed for pleasure, like pinpoints on a map for hotel and sight seeing, and some notes.
Professionally the only thing I’ve seen are plugins for SalesForce, like MapAnywhere (Map Anything?), but most int’l office would not have SalesForce.
It’s possible Admissions Offices have a trip or territory mapping tool if they are using SalesForce as their CRM, but it would not be customized for international travel or tied to critical information related to international partnerships or mobility.
The purpose of the site is to provide:
- An easy way to map what are often complicated and expensive overseas trips
- A database of information about international partners and related agreement terms
- Export tools to more easily produce trip reports
- A comprehensive list of international education conferences in one location for easy reference
- Eventually, to be a mobile app or form that can be cached on a phone for easy note taking and photos to be uploaded once online again. Think: Evernote
Three examples that exist for personal travel, thus a model for this site:
Professional travel planning:
- http://mapanything.com/products/mapanything-for-salesforce - I’ve used this as a sales manager but you have to have SalesForce https://technolutions.com/ product
- Slate used by Admissions has some travel planning features
- It’s possible Ellucian/Recruit CRM has a travel planning component https://www.roadwarriorllc.com/ and https://blog.route4me.com/2017/02/mad-max-road-warrior-route-planner/ both seem to be for driving road warriors
For the class portion, I'd be interested to create the overall flow, like 4-5 pages, but only build out the homepage, the page with the table & links to Global Conferences and the portion on how to create a new trip including the related form that would have customized fields describing the destination. Is that realistic?
Home page for SmartSites - public, all others would require login
Page called: Global Conferences List for 2018
This page would have a table of links to global conferences, dates, and locations that could be sorted by conference name, date and location.
Page called: Map My Travel
This would be the Control Panel or DashBoard for mapping & reporting trips.
- My Trips – see a list of all my trips
- Create New Trip – select stops in an itinerary from the list of conferences, list of existing partners, or add a new destination.
- Upload list of partners – members can upload a list of partners that would be stored in a database. The list could contain information needed when creating an itinerary, such as partner name, address. Once uploaded, these could be used as selections in a drop down to create an itinerary. Ideally, they could be sorted to pre-select (for example) all partners in the UK, click “create itinerary” and an itinerary and map would be created.
Page called: Tools for Your Visit
This page would have checklists for evaluating a new site as a partner, meeting with a current partners, or maybe by topic. New Partner – Mobility New Partner – Research Current Partner – Meeting (whether at a conference, or on-site, or came to my campus) Academic Housing Photo Gallery – upload photos from your site visit
Page called: Reports
This page would enable travelers to export reports on an entire trip itinerary or just one site visit/meeting.