Overview
Student.com are a leading agent of student accommodation across the globe, with a strong presence in Asia and a growing footprint in Europe. A growing need was the distribution of product from smaller providers of accommodation such as estate agents and independent landlords. The requirement arose to create a solution to automatically upload product into the existing student.com infrastructure without interrupting the current process. Key issues around standardisation and frequency of synchronisation were important considerations.
Working with Umi Digital
Umi assembled a project plan that leveraged the power of headless CMS. The plan was to have a two-step process of upload into a central data store followed by a synchronisation into the student.com system.
The plan used headless cms called contentful to act as a central data store. Contentful provided a high-performance API for the student.com system to pull new properties from while also offering a content management API for us to use for the upload.
The Umi team developed a react application which supports the easy CSV upload, standardisation and upload of independent properties into contentful which could then be easily consumed by student.com system.
Outcome
The project was completed efficiently with the application being used regularly to manage the non-standard properties. These are now available and bookable on Student.com.