Build an Intelligent Enterprise Video Platform
Soaq was conceptualized and founded in 2015 by a team of people excelling in technology-based learning and development.
The co-founders at Soaq, including Daniel Wolfe, considered the rising popularity of online video ( YouTube, Vimeo, and Snapchat ) and felt it was time to develop an intelligent video platform that would introduce the power of video to the workplace. Daniel approached Net Solutions to develop a corporate YouTube-style, "Video-On-Demand" platform.
The idea was to build a video platform with a powerful recommendation engine, flexible access, and permissions system, dynamic filters, and a tracking system, and various other distict features.
The first challenge was to ensure that the employees would enjoy using the platform. We had to ensure that the video sharing and collection was designed in a way that it becomes a fun learning activity, instead of an additional task to complete.
The other challenge was that the content had to be streamlined according to the teams, sub-set of users, and individuals. Also, the videos pushed by recommendation engines had to be specific for every user within each individual organization
Our Product Owner team ideated and brainstormed on this and came up with a concept of "unique permissions". We planned that each permission would have its own priority and place to get displayed on the site. Also, in order to not bombard the users with too many irrelevant videos, we introduced the concept of dynamic filters. This helped in filtering out the users on the basis of location, department, employee status, personality types, or any other custom attributes.
We also ensured that the Soaq homepage mosaic would allow users to distinguish easily between the mandatory videos, and the most relevant ones. This helps the admin users of Soaq or any other organization, check excuses made by employees when they missed out on watching any required videos.
After a series of brainstorm sessions both internally and with the client, our Product Owner and User Experience teams came up with a great user flow which was intuitive, complete, and easy for users to adopt.
The project was done with an Agile team engagement model. The client realized that they needed a team who understands all aspects of product development, with demonstrated analysis, design, and technical capabilities.
We first prepared a proof of concept ( POC ) for the client that they approved and decided to go ahead with the collaboration. The product was developed using Agile and Scrum methodologies, the focus was to define and develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and release it to the target audience for feedback and then iterate. The MVP was a huge success and had quite a good number of successful releases after that.
We used an AWS transcoder for transcoding videos and OPlayer for playing them.
We also implemented a third-partly recommendation engine and customized it to strengthen the recommendations. There are lot of factors on which the videos need to be recommended – all the factors were brainstormed and analyzed before finalizing the recommendation engine and we finally selected Prediction IO.
We used AngularJS to develop the front-end. Play Framework 2.3, Scala 2.11, Netty and Reactive Mongo Extensions 0.10.2 were used for including the non-blocking, and reactive platform features. We used SendGrid for sending emails to users.
Soaq is world's first intelligent, and widely-used enterprise YouTube solution that recommends videos based on behavorial parameters.
Soaq is designed to be a mobile first solution as employees can use this solution on the go, and also beyond the office premises.
Soaq is being loved by users for the simplicity and insightfulness it provides. The experience and performance of the product is great especially due to the key features like smart distribution, advanced lters, tracking, and recommended videos for better employee engagement.
Not only is Soaq a video consumption platform for stored content but it provides an advantage to live stream company events for the employees.
Storing videos could take up a lot of storage space thus leading to a huge cost for an enterprise; however, Soaq let's you access all your videos securely on the cloud and also allows you to access content from anywhere.
Working with Net Solutions for the past 8 years has re-enforced our decision to not only outsource some of our software development but also to continue working with them as our partner. I recommend Net Solutions without hesitation to any team, who is looking to scale their team and increase technical capabilities.
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