From Legacy to Cloud: Modernizing SchoolTool for Better Student Outcomes 

Migrating to the Cloud: A Strategic Move for SchoolTool’s Growth

At Mindex, we undertook the challenge of modernizing our product, SchoolTool, a student management system designed exclusively for New York State schools. After more than 20 years of service, SchoolTool had accumulated significant technical debt—a common issue among long-standing applications. To continue fulfilling our core mission of meeting the evolving needs of school districts across the state, we recognized the necessity of addressing this debt and creating a modern, future-proof platform. 

Our modernization journey began with an ambitious goal: migrating over 400 school districts to the cloud. This transition would not only enable us to release product updates more rapidly but also allow us to introduce new and updated features, such as our Advanced Analytics leveraging GenAI technology.  

Initially, we aimed to complete these migrations over three years; however, through our partnership with AWS and the Regional Information Centers (RICs) in New York State, we were able to streamline the process and achieve our goal in just two years. In this case study, we detail how we successfully migrated over 400 school districts to the cloud, positioning SchoolTool for future growth and innovation. 

The Journey to the Cloud 

The migration of SchoolTool was complex due to the distribution of over 400 districts across 12 Regional Information Centers (RICs), each employing its own unique approach to hosting and supporting the system. To navigate this transition successfully, we needed to unify these diverse environments under a cohesive cloud infrastructure while ensuring that each RIC could effectively serve its respective districts without interruption. 

Drawing on our experience from our Cloud Services division, where we have migrated numerous customers to the cloud, we recognized that our approach would involve more than just a simple "lift and shift". Each RIC needed to maintain its unique support for school districts throughout the migration to a cloud-hosted model. 

At the heart of our migration strategy was modernization. By moving to the cloud, we could overcome the limitations of our legacy system and implement new features more frequently. 

To facilitate this transition, we communicated several other key benefits of migrating to the cloud: 

• Enhanced Security: The cloud solution offers robust measures to protect student data. 

• Infrastructure Management: We would handle infrastructure updates, ensuring consistent performance with the latest technology. 

• Agility in Development: The cloud environment allows for more frequent updates and faster deployment of urgent state-level changes, enabling us to better meet the evolving needs of our users.