Caspio Helps University Optimize Business Operations

Case Study Synopsis

Transcript

I’m Floris van der Leest. I’m senior systems analyst at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

KAUST specializes in four areas of research: environment, food, water, energy. We are a graduate university, so we don’t have any undergrads, but it’s still a vibrant community inside Saudi Arabia.

Similar to MS Access, But With Cloud Advantages

My main role at the university is collecting data from different sources and being able to report on all kinds of data that relate to research.

I started working for the university two years ago. Then, a project came along: they wanted me to build an online database. I was about six months into the job, and I could build databases, but I’ve never done anything online.

I came across Caspio.

I read about Caspio, and somewhere, it says Access. And I’m a big fan of using Access as a database. I thought it would be great if they could do similar kind of things. So, I asked my boss if I could have a month to play with Caspio, because it was a trial account, and see if I could break it or do anything with it.

The Caspio Customer Support team was very helpful because they helped me get across roadblocks in the first two weeks.

Get Powerful Features Right out of the Box

I was happy after a month to report back to him that I could build the app, and it was almost done. So, in the trial account, I got the app that I should build already built, while it was still in the trial period.

The best thing about Caspio is, out of the box, a lot of things are possible.

Out of the box, you can create the basic forms, the basic lookup lists, the basic drop-down boxes, and make it pretty good for data integrity. But it also allows you to write and import and copy in JavaScript and everything else — to make things a little bit smarter, and a little bit more robust.

Making Other Office Processes More Efficient

We first started off with a simple package but went up to premium very quickly because other people saw how well they could use the Caspio platform too.

Having discovered Caspio and now see what I can do with it, I think it will help me make a lot of processes in our office more efficient.