Build an Intranet Application for your organization using DhiWise Flutter App Builder

Coruscate Ventures is a start-up incubator, with 150+ on-premise employees; subsidiaries included…The organization takes employee work-life balance seriously and offers perks relevant to the same. 

The facilities include tie-ups with other organizations for banking, insurance, lunch, etc., making life easier for every employee around. The organization's world-class infrastructure also makes on-premise meetings and discussions, fun and productive 

The organization conducts training sessions for emerging technologies and essential skill development. It also provides its employees with a platform to post about upcoming events, seminars, and webinars so that everybody can be part of it.

Despite the features on offer, the challenge was always to gather, store and show all this information on a single platform to the employees in a way that they can consume it effortlessly. And that is why an all-inclusive intranet app was envisioned. 

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Preferred App Specifications

Coruscate Ventures wanted to develop a comprehensive application with cross-platform support. This way it would be possible to install the same on both Android and iOS operating systems. 

And quite appropriately, they chose Flutter as the preferred technical framework. Also, the application was to be developed within a few days and the organization couldn’t assign many resources for the same.

The initial focus included the following aspects:

1. A lightweight, responsive, & cross-platform application

2. Managing a datastore for the application

3. Securing the app and its services with limited users

4. Stakeholder-based access to the services

5. Check availability and book/cancel a meeting space and get reminders via push notifications

6. An Interactive Profile with the skills of an employee and a list of his/her booked spaces.

7. List of Tie-ups and their details provided by the organization

8. A Screen to add a notice of meetings/celebrations/announcements.

9. An informative screen to view and add the upcoming webinar links that others can attend.

10. A Screen to ask for Learning sessions on which anyone can upvote and let the experts know about their eagerness.

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Challenges faced: Pain Points

As seen with preferred specifications, the application did not have any iterative requirements. Instead, it should have been easy to develop it in a single go. Also, it is expected to be bug-free, and devoid of maintenance requirements. 

And these features were easily made available from the scratch by cross-platform app development strategies. Due to the following reasons, application development did get delayed a lot before being made available for employees.

And there were other challenges, including:

1. Higher Development cost

2. Lack of resources

3. Basic UI/UX formats

4. Additional costs as separate UI/UX engineers were asked to pitch in

5. Security Threats - outside users' access to the application 

6. Additional Time cost as third-party data storage application’s mechanism needs to be understood by engineers

7. Faulty and unresponsive API responses, led by frequent crashes

8. Slower deployment of application UI as Coruscate was traditionally converting designs to code.

9. Requirement of backend APIs and engineers to develop them.

10. Difficulty in integrating APIs to UI at zero cost

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‍Role Of DhiWise

As the world’s 1st 100% Developer-centric ProCode Platform, DhiWise made life easier for Coruscate’s in-house app developers by:

• Offering them access to an intelligent and quick Platform-as-a-Service interface. A platform that ensured that developers didn’t have to spend a lot of time converting their App’s Figma design to UI in Flutter. 
• A platform with support for  Firebase Authentication, Firestore, and Supabase integration which helped the application’s data storage easier.

For Coruscate Ventures, though, DhiWise came across as the platform of choice, as the app requirements involved several UI components, authentication, data Storage, tricky navigations, API integrations, third-party integrations, and more.

Coruscate Ventures made use of the flutter app builder from Dhiwise to develop an application for multiple ecosystems, concurrently.

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How DhiWise Helped Coruscate Ventures get the app launched in a week

DhiWise continues to help Coruscate Ventures’ brilliant in-house developers achieve perfection. Here are the ways every challenge was mitigated in the first place, and the app came out to be better than what was envisioned

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1. Cost Cutting on UI/UX Building

Coruscate Ventures designers were able to bring in simpler, easy-to-use yet attractive, and interactive Figma designs to give the app a distinguished look. 

Although there were some component blockages, DhiWise’s interactive UI helped the developer change the type of component based on the data it received on the platform itself. That saved a lot of iteration of design changes and freed up the designer/developer bandwidth.

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2. API Integration using Open APIs

As the application needed to store and fetch data and most of the data was static, DhiWise allowed multiple ways to do so. 

Coruscate Developers used Firestore by Firebase, Supabase, and Airtable APIs, as a hybrid data source for their application. These integrations resulted in relief from developing separate backend APIs for the application, which in turn made the app less prone to crashes

Dhiwise’s API Integration feature allowed the developer to set API requests, handle responses for both success and errors as well as in binding the response to the Screens directly from the platform, all while following the visual programming norms.

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‍3. Authentication

The application requirement was to perform role-based authentication and there was no backend available for the application, DhiWise came to the rescue by providing Firebase Authentication, where Login/SignIn directly with the firebase was possible. Also with DhiWise on board, it provided validators to components resulting in secure Login and SignUp.

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‍4. Platform Independence

As Coruscate Ventures’ Developers used DhiWise’s Flutter builder and Flutter provides cross-platform applications, it was made easy to provide the application to android as well as iOS users in the organization concurrently.

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5. App Navigations, Alerts, and App Preview

The Intranet application of Coruscate Ventures boasts seamless navigation standards, starting from splash screens to the homepage to booking spaces for meetings, tie-ups, posting webinars, and getting upvotes on learning sessions from the experts in their workforce—all thanks to DhiWise’s modern ProCode platform.

And guess what, as some transitions and navigation were created in Figma, they were migrated directly to DhiWise Flutter Builder, as DhiWise even offered support for prototypes to make app navigations quicker and provided the application previews with navigations for multiple mobile screens.

Also, DhiWise GUI is stacked with support for alerts, push notifications and other API-specific responses to mitigate the app crashes on API failures.

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‍6. Source Code Ownership and Quality

Coruscate Ventures’ Developers never had to rely on No-Code and Low-Code platforms with DhiWise on board. Because they could always get the code view of every app, regardless of the selected framework (Flutter in this case) after just deploying it once, the design-to-code access was there too, courtesy of the developer-friendly DhiWise Plugin!

The features like Git Integration and IDE plugins made developers get the ownership of the application's source code and their updates from DhiWise, within a few clicks in their IDEs.

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7. Turnaround Time of Building the Application

Without DhiWise, functionalities like in-app navigations, login setup, API integrations, Firebase, and Supabase integrations, and more required 72+ development hours to set up. With DhiWise Builders in play, the development hours were reduced to 30 or even less, thereby speeding up the TTM by at least three times.

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Overall, connecting with DhiWise for getting the Intranet app development was a strategic and implementational win for Coruscate Ventures. And it is a matter of time that they start looking at other technologies and frameworks to address other organizational aspects, at warped speeds. 

We definitely recommend DhiWise to anyone looking to build enterprise grade apps. The platform has made our app development lifecycle far easier & that’s saying something! 

‍Sign up for DhiWise.