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SHOWCASE
Spreading Compassion Digitally
Appleton Compassion Project
Skyline created a virtual art exhibit and three mobile apps to provide an unforgettable museum experience for the Trout Museum of Art.
SHOWCASE
Financial Power
ClearTREND
The clearTREND® app helped The Appleton Group grow their business and gain new clients in a cost-effective way.
SHOWCASE
Simplified Banking
CoVantage Credit Union
Skyline created a fresh new website for CoVantage Credit Union to better fit their brand strategy. The new site provides easy-to-use tools to their members enhancing the user experience while allowing greater content control to the CoVantage marketing team.
SHOWCASE
Manage Tasks & Volunteers
Riverview Gardens
Skyline partnered with Riverview Gardens and COTS in Appleton to build a Volunteer Management System for the community garden. The Skyline Opportunity System consists of web-based and mobile apps that allow the gardens to operate without a volunteer coordinator.
Spreading Compassion Digitally
Appleton Compassion Project
Skyline created a virtual art exhibit and three mobile apps to provide an unforgettable museum experience for the Trout Museum of Art.
Making A Difference
The Appleton Compassion Project is a mosaic-style community art project that involved approximately 10,500 Appleton Area School District K-12 art students. Students received a 6” x 6” art panel to visually create their idea of compassion. In addition, each student prepared a corresponding statement that reflected their thoughts and ideas on compassion.
Skyline created a virtual exhibit which allowed visitors to find a specific piece of art in the museum, read the corresponding statements, and enjoy the exhibit to the fullest. The exhibit was also available online allowing students to spread their ideas on compassion around the globe.
Microsoft Azure Provides Flexibility
The Appleton Compassion Project Virtual Exhibit was built on the Microsoft Azure platform using Microsoft PivotViewer, Silverlight, and Deep Zoom. The benefits of using Azure became apparent very early on as we knew we needed to have a large amount of storage space available to house the 10,500+ high resolution images. Alternatives to Azure were evaluated, including hosting the site on a server within the school system, and were quickly ruled out. Not only was the potential space needed an issue but we couldn’t easily predict the amount of bandwidth the site would possibly need since many big-name celebrities, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, were invited to participate in this project. The school district would have needed to purchase a large server and also be prepared for very high amounts of traffic, something that did not fit into their limited budget.
Completely Scalable
Images were added to the virtual exhibit in batches of 500 to 3,000 at a time. As we updated the PivotViewer and ran the process for the Deep Zoom files, scalability became a necessity. Using Azure allowed us to scale up for computationally intense processes, such as creating the Deep Zoom files, in some cases allowing tasks to be performed up to 3x faster. The initial image load took almost 30 hours to process, but by optimizing the code, creating parallel processes, and increasing the size of the Azure Virtual Machine (VM), it was reduce to eight hours. The Azure VM size was changed after the completion of the Deep Zoom creation process to reduce costs. Running the Deep Zoom process with 10,500+ images resulted in over one million files.
Impactful Museum Experience
The Compassion Project exhibit covered every inch of wall space within the museum spanning two floors and multiple galleries. Kiosks in the museum and mobile apps allowed guests to find artwork easily, learn about the artist, and read the associated artist statements which could not be displayed with the art. The Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps were also developed an enhanced the museum experience considerably. The apps were designed specifically to help visitors to the museum view the artist statements. The art panels were mounted in the museum and had the panel numbers displayed below them. Visitors were able to type the panel number or student name into the mobile apps and read the accompanying artist statement while the art was in front of them. The Virtual Exhibit on the website allowed proud artists to share their work with family members and friends around the globe. Through the creative use of technology we’ve were able to provide a very thorough, unique, and interactive exhibit experience; one visitors will not soon forget.
Financial Power
ClearTREND
The clearTREND® app helped The Appleton Group grow their business and gain new clients in a cost-effective way.
Making A Difference
clearTREND®, an investment research app developed for The Appleton Group, helps keep your portfolio on the right side of the market. Available for both desktop and mobile devices, clearTREND analyzes price movements for a nearly endless number of investment securities including ETFs, mutual funds, individual stocks and market indexes. clearTREND calculates which time periods are best to consider when making investment decisions, and recommends timely adjustments to your investments when those trends have turned.
Business Growth
Appleton Group wanted to expand their service offerings and launch new portfolio strategies. With the addition of clearTREND they were able to launch eight new portfolio strategies in one year without adding any staff. Without clearTREND, they would have had to double their research and trading staff to facilitate this growth.
In it’s first year, clearTREND contributed to business growth by:
• Increasing account advisory revenue by 19%
• Contributing $11.4 million in total investment gains
• Bringing in $4.8 million in assets from new clients
• Decreasing measured portfolio risk by 45.2% over a typical “buy and hold” unmanaged investment strategy.
Azure is Cost Effective
Hosting in Azure provides the ability to rapidly scale in any direction, up or down, making capacity a non-issue. Deploying across six Azure
instances gives Appleton Group high flexibility, yet maintains a low overhead cost. By using redundant instances for each of the roles we can ensure 99.5% uptime for clearTREND.
Using Azure Marketplace to make clearTREND commercially available allowed Appleton Group to go to market without adding additional
infrastructure or staff. Azure Marketplace handles the e-commerce
aspects of the product like credit card processing, PCI compliance and account management so Appleton Group can focus resources on
value-added clearTREND features.
New Clients and Markets
Appleton Group has identified three additional markets beyond their
existing private clients.
1. B2C – Individual investors who manage their own investments and understand the value of research tools to make fact-based investment decisions
2. B2B Financial Institutions – Mutual fund managers and investment firms who are looking for better research engines to add to their decision-
making toolkits.
3. B2B – Any organization interested in the optimal trends of key indices like petroleum, corn, or gold. Many commodities can be extremely volatile. An understanding the optimal trends and when to buy could be highly beneficial to the bottom line.
Simplified Banking
CoVantage Credit Union
Skyline created a fresh new website for CoVantage Credit Union to better fit their brand strategy. The new site provides easy-to-use tools to their members enhancing the user experience while allowing greater content control to the CoVantage marketing team.
Making A Difference
Skyline developed a new website built upon the Microsoft SharePoint Content Management System which allows non-IT personnel to manage the site and make efficient and effective content updates. CoVantage can now post interest rates on their website in real-time giving their members easy 24/7 access. The site includes easy-to-find, enhanced tools such as loan, mortgage and retirement calculators that help members plan for their future. Resources such as educational seminars and financial counseling provide a more robust online experience for existing members and help CoVantage to attract new members.
Award Winning Design
The CoVantage Credit Union website won the national Graphic Design USA magazine award for website design. The design provides a unique and progressive look to better fit the CoVantage brand strategy.
Each year, Graphic Design USA Magazine holds an American Graphic Design Contest open to everyone in the graphic arts community. In 2012 they received over 8,000 applications for their annual contest. Of these applications, only 15% are recognized with a certificate of excellence.
The American Graphic Design Awards has emerged as one of the most prestigious graphic communications contests in the U.S. and Skyline is honored to be recognized for our work.
Enhanced User Experience
The addition of updated imagery, third-party tools, educational resources and social content has enhanced the user experience of the CoVantage website. Better organization of the site allows members to find tools easily from the home page. Additionally, CoVantage can now provide members with real-time access to interest rates, news and events, and a listing of items for sale - information that was not easily updated in the past due to the amount of time it took to make changes to the site.
Continually updating information and adding new tools helps CoVantage Credit Union to demonstrate their commitment to their member owners.
Powerful Site Management
Built upon Microsoft SharePoint, the built-in Content Management System allows non-IT personnel to add to or update the content on the website.
With their previous site — a custom-built site containing mostly static text — the CoVantage marketing team was dependent on their IT team to make even minor changes which sometimes took 24 hours or more. Now CoVantage marketing staff can add new pages, content, imagery, documents, and forms quickly and easily, on their schedule. They can even schedule content to start or stop on given days. This capability makes it possible for CoVantage to provide interest rates to their members in real-time on their website — something they couldn’t do previously.
Manage Tasks & Volunteers
Riverview Gardens
Skyline partnered with Riverview Gardens and COTS in Appleton to build a Volunteer Management System for the community garden. The Skyline Opportunity System consists of web-based and mobile apps that allow the gardens to operate without a volunteer coordinator.
Making A Difference
Community Outreach Temporary Services (COTS), an Appleton-based group that serves the city’s homeless, purchased a golf course and turned it into community-supported agriculture enterprise with the
intent of growing vegetables and fruits year-round while providing life skills training to those in need.
Riverview Gardens hoped to build a volunteer army to support and maintain the gardens and needed a way to manage the opportunities and volunteers as well as track hours toward community service work for those performing it. The gardens are self-sustaining and hiring a volunteer coordinator was not an option due to cost.
Simplified Task Management
Riverview Gardens is a 77-acre community greenspace containing dozens of greenhouses, hoop houses and gardens. Additionally there are miles of recreational trails, picnic tables and park spaces that need to be maintained, creating thousands of volunteer opportunities.
The Skyline Opportunity system makes it possible for Riverview Gardens' staff to manage the myriad of volunteer opportunities they have right at the volunteer locations. Whether in a hoop house, out on the trail or knee deep in the mud of a vegetable patch, Riverview’s volunteer management system allows them to manage a large and diverse group of volunteers where they need to most ... in the field.
Lean Staffing
Maintaining the community gardens and green spaces takes hundreds of volunteers. Skyline built a volunteer management system for Riverview Gardens that allows staff access but more importantly allows volunteers to sign up for and manage their opportunities via an online tool. Volunteers can choose dates and tasks that fit their schedule and make changes as needed without calling or visiting the gardens.
The Skyline Opportunity System has allowed Riverview Gardens to manage hundreds of volunteers without hiring a volunteer coordinator saving them tens of thousands of dollars annually.
Enjoyable Volunteer Experience
Not only does the Skyline Opportunity System provide benefits to Riverview Gardens, it provides an extremely enjoyable experience to the volunteer!
Volunteers create a profile and indicate their areas of interest. The system provides a list of opportunities based on the interested the volunteer has chosen. Volunteers choose the opportunities that fit their schedules and liking so they are guaranteed to be assigned to tasks they’ll enjoy. Additionally, volunteers can make changes to their opportunities or reschedule online quickly and easily without calling the Garden.
The system also provides volunteers with reports on number of hours worked and past opportunities.