Manitoba Chambers of Commerce

Posted: September 10, 2018

Project Term: Spring/Summer 2018

Our students developed a web-app for the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce (MCC) to facilitate Member 2 Member Deals within their local membership.

Established in 1931, the MCC is Manitoba’s largest business lobby, with local chambers and direct corporate members. They represent over 10,000 businesses and community leaders. This project was sponsored by the Cantera Corporation Ltd., who have business experience in many fields and maintain close ties to the third largest chamber of the MCC. This is a new venture for Cantera Corporation into the field of providing software/app-based solutions for Chambers of Commerce in North America.

Through the new app, business owners who are registered with the MCC can post deals to promote their business that other MCC members can claim within their respective cities.

The development team was made up of BIT and BTM students, where they got to put their learned skills to serious practice. The team’s goal was to produce minimum viable products (MVP) to the client on two-week sprints, following an agile methodology. Early stages of the project had our team gathering requirements and working together to plan and estimate resources and timelines for the project. Together, they brainstormed, presented ideas, problems, and possible solutions for the client to consider. As sprints are an iterative process, each bi-weekly meeting with the client allowed the project flexibility to accept or modify solutions our team came up with.

By the end of the project, the team was able to implement many features:

All Deals
Members of the MCC who are business owners can create promotional deals that other MCC members could claim. It is up to the site administrators to accept to publish a deal or not. Users have the option of viewing deals, choose favourites, hide deals, and more.
Deals of the week
As a revenue-generating feature for the MCC, a deal of the week serves to promote deals to a higher level at the discretion of the MCC. These deals are featured under a special “Deals of the week” section.
Near Me
Using geolocation from Google Maps’ API, when users give location permission to the app, they can view deals and businesses near them on a map.
Mass Email
Chamber can send a group email to all business owners in one campaign, with the ability to filter businesses by the category of their business speciality.

The student team felt that they strengthened many skills on this project: how to gather requirements; planning; estimating and resolving conflicts. It was a significant opportunity for the BTM students to enhance their communication and management skills, while the BIT students exercised their development and problem-solving skills.

Our BIT students used many technical skills on this project. They set up Scotchbox and Vagrant to develop on a virtual Linux machine – to achieve development/production parity. To keep the project organized, they used CodeIgniter framework. They made plenty of use of their database and php skills.

Technologies used: Scotchbox, Vagrant, CodeIgniter, GoogleMaps, MySQL with Adminer, MailGun, Cron.