Industry

  • Publishing
  • Education

Services

  • Backend software architecture
  • Backend software development

Technologies

  • .Net Core
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • Swagger
  • SQL Server
  • Windows Services
  • Azure Service Bus
  • Apache Solar Server
  • Azure DevOps

Gyldendal is the oldest and largest publishing house in Denmark, and the industry leader of Danish-language textbooks. In order to combat the threat posed by increasing piracy and to cater the needs of students, Gyldendal developed Studybox: a subscription based streaming service that provides unlimited access to textbooks.

Synergy-IT was involved in the design and implementation of the backbone of the whole system, dealing with sign-ups, user authentication, products subscriptions, payments, and integration with various existing and in-house systems as well as with a modern front-end (developed by another company). An additional challenge was the time critical nature of the project: the entire Studybox platform was to be designed, developed, and delivered within 7 months.

The highlights of our engineering efforts are as follows:

  1. We integrated a third-party payment system by designing and developing a REST API that rounded various different services, and provided a clean and business-centric interface to the frontend and other systems.
  2. We designed and developed new data pipelines and integrated them with Gyldendal's existing infrastructure. This included the creation of new databases, and 24/7 running jobs for monitoring the changes in a third party product information management system.
  3. We integrated the existing authentication system with Studybox, and enhanced it to support system-based user profile properties.
  4. We built a platform from scratch for asynchronous processing and delivery of user operations to a third party emailing provider for marketing campaigns and newsletters.

Results

An attractive and affordable alternative to piracy

Studybox provides full access to all the textbooks in Gyldendal's catalogue, providing students with an affordable platform for all their academic literature needs.

Winner of the Danish Digital Award 2021

For its ingenuity and great value, Studybox was awarded the Digital Value Proposition Silver Award by the Danish Digital Award.